On the upside, the tutorials on installation are excellent. Apache, PHP 5 installation and if you get that far, the MySQL installation are all well described and carefully written. The forum works, if you happen to be a programmer. Theres quick help for those seeking answers but not so quick if you are novice...

When you get into trouble is when you realize that version changes make understanding the complex code jargon very difficlut to understand- though coded exaples for the Flash version that I have were provided. The examples are impossibly long and complicated and when you finally sift though them Eureka, it does not work. FRUSTRATING. Though said to have working examples, I could not get the tedious long examples to work on my computer- and spent many hours re reading the entire book to find out why. I did not expect a quick and easy solution to learning but after two months, I made no progress and found my incompetnce with programming becomiing overwhelming. This book may kill your desire to learn, even if you are willing to spend the time.

This book is a time bandit. Phenomonally complicated for beginners, it's written for experienced programmers, though said to be for novices. It has been my experience to see most programmers who write books, write at a level that is not possible to understand by beginners. It's like going into a new city and asking for directions from a local resident, " it's easy to find and you can't miss it " is the norm. Powers may leave you sleeping on the street.

I was very pleased with the book. I like the author's style, and I especially like how the projects are more than your typical "hello world" examples. Yes, some of them do take a little time, but you can type them out or read along as you wish, and they don't take that much time. I thought the book was absolutely excellent at accomplishing what it sets out to do - show you how to integrate flash with PHP and MySQL. Very nice job.

Bah! Who so ever has a bad review concerning this book are those who think that there's a magical, simple solution in making advanced web sites in Flash. Over the years Flash rapidly went from being that Goofy web toy through versions 3-4, to being something that you could potentially make something...practical. With a lot of voodoo, and enough time on your hands. To an actual application development environment...if you were "down" for some XML. But since the advent of Flash MX 2004, it became a full on scary piece of application software, ready to contend with all the full forced development environments such as VB.net and so fourth.

There's only one problem. Macromedia is legendary for giving you arcane, nearing on esoteric text as to how you actually use it's products. The marketing behind that is, of course...so you buy books. Lots and lots of books. Only, the Macromedia books in question STILL don't give you enough information to actually do anything on an intensive level with Flash. You learn as to how to make each of the components work on their own. You can make a quick and dirty web service connection. You can learn how to change the appearance of those components as well. You also can get a huge lesson as to the advancement of Actionscript 1.0 to Actioscript 2.0 But you're never given enough information as to how to develop a REAL web site. UNLESS: you're to use their even more expensive product...ColdFusion. Then, the doors are unleashed to all these various and wonderful things one can do with Flash.

And again, tell me what web hosting solution provides CF at an affordable price? Uh...yeah. That's why the world has gone PHP mad.

So, here we have on one side of the fence, the worlds most controversial (yet very sexy) piece of gadgetry that no one has been able to use quite right. On the other hand, we have the most popular web scripting language in the world. Advanced enough to make enterprise web apps if so needed, but typically used on a much more "simplistic" level but a more "creative" Market...which can be argued as those creative designers who sought out to develop more technical skills to use Flash properly, and ended up learning PHP...because PHP ends up what more people want in the first place.

However, in comes David...and his book. And David basically says "I'll show you how to plug in both these technologies"...And I can not for the life of me understand how people can't get the basics. In the first round, he basically explains the one simple step into all our inner connectivity issues: loadVars. For those who have any sort of dilemma in understanding after reading this book, there's the one big hint as to what you can rummage around in the Macromedia vaults, and perhaps even a Google search now and then.

Having a book that is project driven, verses simple little code snippets takes care of two problems in one fell swoop. Not only do we get to see the magic of the loadVars in action, over and over again. We are offered great ideas to implement on web sites. I mean, the first example: AN EMAIL FORM! And a content management system? (and a token Hangman game, because Flash is great for that!) This is fantastic...one is given the blue print for real web site solutions through this book.

My only "complaint" Why not have an entire corporate site delved out in Flash? I mean, there's more hype than there's actual results (not that I don't believe in Flash)...And the only real example I've ever seen on a larger level is the Macromedia exchange for downloading Extensions.

So, I am intensely enthusiastic about this book (and the writing. Very clear and very friendly). But I would want a volume II, and I want an advanced corporate type site developed in that one!

I didn't care for this book. I was hoping it would go through the basics of sending information from Flash to MySQL via PHP, but it was a disappointment. The main problem with this book is that it teaches by presenting the reader with overly complicated examples. Rather than using bite-sized examples, the author uses a couple of very large projects that the reader is expected to wade through and decipher. Yes, the examples do have comments but it's extremely laborious to decipher all of that code just to get the information you need. I've worked through to page 370 so far and haven't yet learned how to send "hello world" from Flash to a MySQL database and it's not possible to just look that up somewhere. You have to go through and understand the huge examples in their entirety before you can understand any part of them. For someone who is learning this, the examples look like spaghetti code. They are too unwieldy.
Yes, there is a tutorial theme with this book, but the tutorial part is for PHP, not for ActionScript or how to connect the two. When the author gets around to integrating ActionScript with PHP that's when the huge examples and the resulting confusion comes in.
There can't be a very large audience for this book. The step-by-step part in the beginning teaches PHP and there's plenty of other books on the market that do a much better job of that. There's a small section that covers MySQL, but there's plenty of better books that teach MySQL. There is virtually no instruction of ActionScript just code examples and comments. What makes this book different from the other PHP or MySQL books is that it presumably teaches how to use PHP and MySQL with ActionScript. The problem is it does a poor job of that.
You have to wade through multiple lines of digression to get to the main point. When you do get to the main point, the explanation is often confusing. The workflow is not effective. The parts that need explanation are not explained and parts that don't need explanation are covered in a wordy fashion. This book does not have the polish that others like the Hands on Training series, or the Heads Up series have. I don't feel that the author has put himself in the place of the reader. This book needs an editor. Evidently they don't do that at "friends of Ed", but I'm not sure how one would go about editing this book. It would have to be gone over line-by-line. The result would be an entirely different book.
In its favor, the examples are kind of interesting although I'm not interested in the examples, I'm interested in learning the code. The website is up to date. There are a few mistakes in the code, but not many. Although the couple of mistakes that I encountered were not on the errata page.
I gave it 3 stars because the book is not terrible, it just falls down in a lot of important areas. It does have some teaching value and I plan to go back to it after I have more knowledge of the subject matter, but it will probably stay on my shelf for a while.

This book is a really good book to start learning PHP. I wished I had this book a couple of years earlier, it would've saved me a lot of time and money. But this is actually the whole problem with this book. Yes, it covers flash, but it'll only learn you how you can work with PHP-variables in Flash. There are no projects that covers creating a complete flash project with PHP, it'll learn you how to create the scripts for Flash, so Flash can use the script. These tutorials can be found anywhere on the internet, so you don't really need this book.

It learns you more about PHP than Flash. Maybe I expected too much from it, but that's my opinion. After all, it's a good book for starting with PHP in flash.

Foundation PHP5 for Flash is the most useful tutorial book I have ever laid my hands on.

I'm an Actionscripter by nature and I had never written a single php script on my own before touching this book. I really wasn't too sure where to start other than firing up Dreamweaver and hoping it would take care of everything for me. This book took my hand in the first couple of chapters and led me through a custom installation of php5 and apache on my own computer for development purposes. David Powers walks you through the installation with ease and shows you the necessary screenshots so that you'll never get lost. I'll definitely keep this book with me to whenever I install php and apache on other computers.

I found php to be fairly easy to learn considering its similarities with Actionscript. Powers covers passing variables between php and flash in detail (it should be second nature to you if you ever used the loadVars() function for loading XML or text files). The real breakthrough for me was when he started explaining MySQL.

I never knew that working with MySQL was so easy, I guess that's all thanks to phpMyAdmin which he covers in the book. The second I pulled a database entry from MySQL using php then passing it into flash, I knew I had unlocked the most important skill I can have as a web developer. That's exactly why you need this book.

In conclusion, Powers gives you just enough information that you'll be able to take off an experiment with the things that you have learned throughout the book. "Foundation" is the perfect word to describe what you walk away with when you put this book down.

If you're looking to pull sorted information from databases and store information into databases using Flash and php then you need this book.

(...)

-John Lindquist

I've purchased now four book from these series of books the Flash and PHP subject. However, this one is the best yet. It covers all you will need to know to create your own sites and does this through step by step guides/tutorials.

The book covers the ActionScipt you'll use but even if you're used to coding you can understand the actionscript used easily - over even buy their other book on ActionScript.

It's a must have for any developer wanting to use Flash and PHP5.

Unlike many overpriced computer tutorial books, this book delivers on it's promises.

Yes this book shows you how to put your Flash front-end on a PHP/mySQL, database-driven backend in a simple and direct fashion, but more importantly it clarifies lots of the details that are left out in many online and book-based tutorials.

This book took me out of the hazy fog of uncertainty regarding the integration between Flash and PHP and right into the realm of coding my own PHP back-ends. Powers takes a unique and interesting approach by delineating the similarities between Flash's own scripting language, Actionscript, and PHP. PHP and Actionscript, it turns out, are very similar in syntax and have many common functions. This allows anyone with some knowledge of Actionscript to immediately get a grip on PHP.

MySQL is similarly illuminated in this book. Powers, in his section titled "The four essential SQL commands", does in four pages what other books take chapters to do: he outlines just the mySQL you need to get the job done in a direct and clear manner. This part of the book alone is worth the cost of the whole volume.

The tutorials and code samples in this book are all useful and, again unlike other computer code books, require no visits to an errata page to figure out how to make them work--they all work as shown. And don't be fooled by the title--this book works just fine for PHP 4, the predominant version deployed by web hosting companies today.

This book does what it promises. I'm learning a ton of PHP stuff but ,unlike the other books sitting half read in a stack, I don't feel as if I'm straying way off from my goal. This book teaches the PHP foundation but ties it in with Flash like I need it to.

I was hoping for more coverage of amfphp and more talk of PHP playing well with the V2 components but- I learned more PHP in this book because it kept my interest by being Flash relevant- and I think the foundation I've picked up as well as those great database classes have me well on my way approaching other PHP books and picking out the stuff I need knowing I have a the basics down.

The dot.com bubble is long gone from the general public's perception, but one thing is for certain - experienced Flash web designers are one of the most overworked set of people at the moment. Since the last two quarters of 2004, my Flash design consulting work has gone through the roof (and this all the more noticeable because 2003 was *very* quiet for Flash web design).
From talking to other web designers, it is apparent that their phones are also red hot at the moment (summer 2005).

There is a problem though. These new clients don't just want a clever user interface, or some multimedia content. They invariably want Flash to be the front end of a web application. In such projects, Flash is the cool and friendly front end of a server driven system rather than a standalone web interface

Theres a lot of demand out there for flash developers that know about XML, PHP and mySQL, because these are the three technologies most commonly used. Knowing these technologies *and* Flash is also a sure way to double your customer base (and usually also increase your hourly rate...).

The good news is that unlike all competing proprietary systems, XML, PHP and mySQL are all free. They are open source systems.
All you have to do is get them installed on your computer, set up a local and web host, and you have everything you need to start developing or learning.

Um... that's the first of three problems though...

PHP and mySQL are created for the open source community, and that means they don't come in a nice box with a hologram, read-me and an installer that only needs to know which directory you want to install to.

You also need something like Apache installed and running, and theres one or two other apps that make life easier (such as phpMyAdmin). Many designers have been put off by this... you need to install several pieces of software in exactly the right order, and all of them have to work *at the same time* for you to get anywhere.

The first problem solved by this book is that it assumes only knowledge of Flash and basic web design skills, so it leads you by the hand in getting a fully integrated dev system installed and running. I can't tell you how useful this is - open source software is free, but the downside is that it assumes that you know what you are doing!

The second problem is that there's just so much information to take in. Previously, I went out and got several books on PHP, SQL and Apache (plus a few other technologies that I later found were not even needed or were rarely used options), and just didn't know where to start on getting it all up and running with Flash. It took me a good few months to get anywhere. What was missing for me was a book that took Flash as the starting point rather than expect me to figure out where Flash fits in with all these confusing new technologies.

This book goes through the required technologies with a Flash-facing sensibility - `you know Flash already, so I'll start from there and introduce you slowly to the other stuff'. There's only one other book that tackles this route efficiently - and its (a) out of print and (b) sells for extortionate amounts in the second hand market - so foundation PHP5 for flash is currently your best bet in extending Flash skills to server applications.

Finally, there is the problem of knowing what the technology can and cannot do, and how it tends to be set up in practical terms. Even if you know about the link between Flash >> PHP >> back end database, its not clear how the common building blocks (communications, security, etc) are built.

What is really needed is a practical, example based set of tutorials that take you through common problems, rather than the exhaustive reference docs that open source tends to come with. If you look on the web today, theres lots of Flash tutorials on components and ActionScript, but nothing on the important subject of integrating Flash to back end technologies (or it there is, its pretty fragmented). This book is very long, and most of that length is taken up with examples, so it gives you just what you need - practical experience - and lots of it. Even better, the book also provides you with a common library of scripts that (amongst other things) iron out all the really big gotchas and version dependent problems, so you can just get on and design.

So, to conclude...

1. If you are a Flash designer, you need to know back end technologies because that is what the market is currently asking for. You need this book because its contents are fast becoming a necessary skill for the industry you are in.
2. Rather than a single technology, web applications rely on several technologies and applications. Simply getting a development system up and working before you can actually start learning is itself a daunting task. This book tells you exactly what you need and don't need. It is especially good because it concentrates only on the most commonly used (and therefore commercially important) technologies: Apache and PHP/SQL
3. For Flash developers wanting to get into web applications, there is the difficulty in finding *any* material that faces the issue from a Flash centric position that is suitable for designers as opposed to open source gurus. This book takes a Flash centric and totally practical route (as opposed to the more usual theory/reference route that many other books take - something that doesn't often work for designers).

Essential reading.

Disclaimer - I was reviewer on this book. However, it must be said that I *requested* to be reviewer on this book because I strongly believe that it is one of the most important new Flash books to come out in a long time.

Sham Bhangal