I’ve been blogging for a little over a year now and if someone had told me that I’d eventually want to learn or understand anything about open source technology, I would most likely have said “Open source what?” As far as I was concerned, blogging was just about getting one’s words up on a screen so others in cyberspace could read them. Sounded pretty simple to me!

However, the more one wants to do, the more one needs to learn. It’s like real world publishing - if you want your book, or poster or pamphlet etc. to be more than black print on white paper, then obviously one needs to employ more sophisticated methods of publication. Apparently, I had reached that point with blogging and that meant embracing all sorts of things I’d previously associated with tech geeks.

I knew that PHP had something to do with getting up the information we see on web pages, but that was it. The current book up for review seemed like an excellent starting point for someone as clueless as me. It’s a pretty hefty volume at over 900 pages but is very well set out. There are two distinct sections – one for PHP, and the other for MySQL.

The first section is about PHP, an open source technology that is responsible for what appears on web pages, and in what manner. One need not go further than the Blogcritics homepage, for example - if you go to where ‘Blogcritic of the Day’ is displayed, you will notice that the name periodically changes because the page file (a PHP file) is written in such a manner to allow for this information to be variable.

Gilmore spends twenty-one chapters thoroughly explaining how PHP can create dynamic web content, starting with a brief history of its development and installation instructions. It is a lot of information to go through, but the chapters are organised so that you can skip through to the sections that suit you, though the author suggests this is an option better suited to intermediate or advanced users of PHP.

Before embarking upon the MySQL section, chapters 22 and 23 address some ‘bridging’ material. Chapter 22 discusses database servers and alternatives - specifically, a pared-down version of MySQL, referred to as SQLite, for the technologically timid.

Chapter 23 briefly introduces the reader to database extraction layer software and options for those wishing to use database software other than those that are usually employed, so that they know there is some choice, albeit limited. At this point things were admittedly starting to get confusing for me, but a clear diagram explains how all these elements are connected to get your web page up and running. This helps to put everything in context.

Finally, we can tackle MySQL, a relational database server. There is extensive discussion on why MySQL has become so popular; it should be easy for those who have used other databases, its availability in several platforms, emphasis on speed as opposed to lots of features that generally go ignored but best of all, it’s free and easily accessible by download.