Addressbook DB design

ghola

Hi folks,

I've read several articles on phpbuiler, the one about DB normalization was great for me.

I know HTML and JavaScript pretty well as well as some lingo (Director).

I want to use PHP & MySql. So I'm gonna begin by doing a little project for myself: an addressbook in PHP.

I would like to know if some of you have had esperience in designing a DB model for an addressbook. The thing is I want it to be as complete as possible

(birthdays, astrological signs, personal and business info, children, whatever...)

It would be great if my friends could use the same DB to store their own addressbook, protected by a password. I'm sure this is something to consider

straight from DB conception, right?

It should also be easy to use (add/remove) and enable search by criteria (name, date of birth, email...)

I am not a complete newbie in PHP and I have already played with MySql but I would like to get more serious...

So if anybody could give me some pointers, where to start, a tutorial, sample it would help me a lot.

Thanks,

Sébastien

dnszero

It sounds like you've picked a great place to start already. If your inclined to spend a little cash I strongly recommend the book "PHP and MySQL Web Development".

A few pointers:

Layout all of your tables on paper before you start. Fill out the field names first, then go back through and decide on datatypes.

Learn to use the mysql command line tool, get comfortable with creating tables by hand and executing queries by hand.

Webminhttp://www.webmin.com/ really helped me a lot. It has a mysql module that will let you view and edit, tables and data. It'll also let you execute random sql. Very quick and handy for a lot of common operations.

Aliases are your friend, esp if you need to query a table against itself.

WebMonkeyhttp://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/programming/php/ has quite a few decent tutorials and examples.

Devshed.com also has some good PHP examples, you might check there too.

Hope that helps.
---DnsZero