If you’re going to use MySQL to display information on the web or in another application, you will eventually need to understand the structure of your database and how to construct SQL queries.
Two of the most common applications you’ll use with MySQL are PHP and Dreamweaver. PHP is a programming language. As soon as you start using MySQL with PHP, you run into the mysql_query() function. PHP has no built-in MySQL functionality. You construct a MySQL query, give that to PHP, and PHP hands it, intact, to the MySQL server.
Dreamweaver will insulate you from MySQL queries for the first few minutes. But as soon as you start doing anything out of the ordinary, you’ll run up against the “advanced” section of your recordset window. That “SELECT… FROM… WHERE” phrase in the advanced window is nearly a pure MySQL query.
Much of this is inter-related. If you click the “code” button on a Dreamweaver page you’ve added a recordset to, you’ll see PHP code. Dreamweaver creates the PHP code for you.
