Building a cool website using HTML, PHP and MySQL

Dynamic web pages usually have three parts.

• An HTML viewer page
• a script engine to access the database and generate the HTML page
• a form for users to create user friendly requests
• a database

The database engine is generaly very user unfriendly. Seeking a specific type of information requires several discrete steps and if any one of them is wrong, you get an error and a refusal to provide the information. Since the business of creating a web resource is to provide the resource to users, you can provide tools through PHP and HTML to give your users a helpful way to search for information.

For example, you want to find books by an author, but you are kind of vague about his name. The MySql code for this looks like:

mysql> select books.title as title, concat(authors.efname,' ',authors.elname)
    -> as scribe,books.book_id as id,
    -> Topics.topic as subject from books
    -> inner join 
    -> bookswritten using(book_id)
    -> inner join authors using(writer_id)
    -> inner join Topics using(Topic_id)
    -> where authors.elname like 'Prat%'
    -> group by books.title order by authors.elname, books.title;
+-------------------+------------------+-----+-----------------+
| title             | scribe           | id  | subject         |
+-------------------+------------------+-----+-----------------+
| Feet of Clay      | Terry  Pratchett | 198 | fantasy         |
| Fifth Elephant    | Terry  Pratchett | 233 | fantasy         |
| Going Postal      | Terry  Pratchett | 175 | Romance         |
| Good Omens        | Terry  Pratchett | 134 | Science Fiction |
| Hogfather         | Terry  Pratchett | 145 | fantasy         |
| Johnny & The Dead | Terry  Pratchett | 133 | Science Fiction |
| Lords and Ladies  | Terry  Pratchett | 197 | fantasy         |
| Making Money      | Terry  Pratchett | 195 | fantasy         |
| Reaper Man        | Terry  Pratchett | 201 | fantasy         |
| Soul Music        | Terry  Pratchett | 202 | fantasy         |
| the Truth         | Terry  Pratchett | 200 | fantasy         |
+-------------------+------------------+-----+-----------------+
11 rows in set (0.02 sec)

This is not the kind of customer service that will have folks flocking to your bookstore or your library. They want a form that looks like this

And gives a result that looks a bit like this

There are direct links to the books in question in the result.