In this new article from DevShed.com today, they take a look at "Database Applications and the Web" with an excerpt from the O'Reilly book "Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL".

With most of the services on the web being powered by web database applications, it becomes important for any web developer to know how bring together the web and databases to build applications. This article gets you started. It is excerpted from chapter one of the book Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL, written by Hugh E. Williams & David Lane (O'Reilly, 2004; ISBN: 0596005431).

This book presents a highly popular, easy, low-cost way to bring together the Web and databases to build applications. The most popular database management system used in these solutions is MySQL, a very fast and easy-to-use system distributed under an Open Source license by its manufacturer, MySQL AB. We discuss MySQL in detail in this book.

They look at the web from the ground up, starting with the HTTP protocol, working through the client in the three-tier model, then all the way up to web scripting and PHP5...