The PHP language and PostgreSQL database server have long offered an ideal blend of practicality and power for both the novice and experienced programmer alike. Yet the continued evolution of both technologies makes them better suited to drive enterprise-class applications than ever before. In Beginning PHP and PostgreSQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, noted authors Cristian Darie, Emilian Balanescu, and Mihai Bucica show you how to take advantage of this powerful duo to build an e-commerce web site, guiding you step-by-step through the process of designing and developing the project.


Each chapter is devoted to a specific new feature. You'll learn how to build an online product catalog complete with pagination features, shopping cart, checkout mechanism, product search feature, product recommendations, administrative features, customer accounts, an order-management system, and more. You'll also learn how to process electronic payments by integrating several popular payment services, including PayPal, DataCash, and Authorize.net, and how to integrate the Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS).


The book promotes good programming practices, including the separation of presentation code, business code, and data access code using a 3-tier architecture. PDO (PHP Data Objects) is used to connect to the database, and PostgreSQL functions are used to store the data logic. The Smarty templating engine is used to create the presentation layer. For a preview of what this book will teach you, take a look at the HatShop shopping cart demo.