Jon Stephens – författare

Just menus? Yes. This book focuses on a single, vitally important task that confronts everyone who builds web sites for use by people: how to code and present menus that are easy to understand and use, that convey what users need to know about the many paths they can take to get to the information they want, in a variety of technologies. Every web site has a menu (trust us-we looked for a professional site without a menu, and came up empty). Some sites have two, three, or more menus on the same page. Menus give users a simple way to deal with the dozens, hundreds, even thousands of options (or more), ideally sorting those options into understandable divisions people can choose with some confidence that they'll end up more or less where they intended to go. In this book, we'll show you how professional sites organize content, present options, and use a wide array of technologies for navigation. Sometimes these approaches work well and serve as excellent models for your own navigation systems. Sometimes? Well - nobody's perfect! We'll walk you through an extensive range of different menu code that can be easily downloaded from http://www. glasshaus. com/, and adapted to your own needs, taking all the hassle out of menu coding.

Nearly every non-trivial application requires data persistence, and for an application of any significant size and scope, persistence is typically realized using a database. For open source and many other projects, the MySQL database is a very popular choice: it's free; it's fast, robust, and scalable; and it runs on all of the major platforms, allowing maximal use of available hardware resources. However, it's easy to throw away My SQL's speed and other advantages if your database design is inefficient. Needlessly duplicating data, using improper types for columns, overloading a single table where multiple tables should be used, failing to leverage the calculation features of MySQL, and making multiple queries instead of efficient, single query are some of the common mistakes.MySQL Database Design and Optimization, shows you how to identify, overcome, and avoid gross inefficiencies, and demonstrates how to maximize the many data manipulation features that MySQL has built-in.MySQL Database Design and Optimization explains how to include tests and branching in your queries, how to normalize your database, and how to issue concurrent queries to boost performance, among many other design and optimization topics. If you're building or maintaining any significant application and are using MySQL, this book is for you.

Creating a usable e-commerce application is a daunting challenge. There is so much to do, from the initial concept, through to designing and coding the application. This leaves a lot of scope for things to go wrong.In this book, we take all the hassle out of online shopping applications, by showing you how to plan your application, design the user interface and data store, and code the entire thing. But it doesnt stop there &emdash; we provide the full code for two complete shopping cart applications, customizable for your own needs.What you'll learn:* Planning and designing an entire e-commerce application* Implementing the product catalog, shopping cart, and checkout system* Making your web application secureThis book is for any web professional who wants to implement a shopping site, or add e-commerce functionality to an existing site. HTML knowledge, as well as knowledge of one of the backend combinations (ASP/SQL Server or PHP/MySQL) is essential to get the most use out of this book.