Somebody please answer this,..

Dolemite50

Hi,
I bought a few PHP books and they each have a simple script to print results from a mysql query.

<?php

$query = "SELECT * FROM burgers WHERE burgname = 'whopper'";
$result = mysql_query($query)
or die ("Invalid query: " . mysql_error());

echo $result;
?>

This prints "Resource ID #3".

Through other posts I was able to find that this wont work and I need to use myql_fetch_array().

My question is WHY do so many books and tutorials tell me that this will work as is? Am I using an outdated version or something?

Thanks for any input, I'm afraid to continue with these books.

First post by the way, howdy all!

eoghain

I've never seen any books state that printing out the variable you get from [man]mysql_query/man would give you a list of the data. I'd recommend that you get most of your information from PHP's site (www.php.net), ot stick with established books. I'd recommend some but all of my PHP books are at home, and I'm not.

Pig

If they made that obvious of an error, I would return the book.

adrian_quah

hi Dolemite50, stick to the official Documentations downloadable at php.net....u would be pretty safe n satified 🙂

TheDefender

Hi Dolemite50, I too have never seen a book give out that kind of incomplete info. It's like that school in California that was teach that there are 53 states... Manual is your friend, and if you are on a Windows machine, there is a downloadable CHM version of the manual, so it's always available on and offline.

I think what you are running into (which a lot of newbies do) is in the effort to get the example codes working, you may not have worked through everything... People tend to skip past the actual explanation text and go right to the code, and consequently, things get missed. A lot of books break things down step by step, and you gotta work through it all.

If your book really did tell you that what you have here will work, then do yourself a favor, and burn that book, because it's only good enough to warm you for 10 minutes on a cold night.

Dolemite50

I think what you are running into (which a lot of newbies do) is in the effort to get the example codes working, you may not have worked through everything... People tend to skip past the actual explanation text and go right to the code, and consequently, things get missed. A lot of books break things down step by step, and you gotta work through it all.

Ahhh, busted. Thanks so much for all the help everybody.

TheDefender

Like I implied... you aren't the first to do that, and you won't be the last...😃