FreeCodingBooks is an archived PHP learning project created to explore database-driven web development, AJAX search, file uploads, basic administration features, and user-submitted book requests.
The application allows users to search for programming books by name or category, view external source links, and submit requests for additional books.
Important
This is a legacy educational project and is not intended for production use.
It uses deprecated PHP APIs and contains implementation patterns that do not meet modern security standards.
- Search programming books by title or category
- AJAX-powered search results
- Book cover image uploads
- User requests for additional books
- Basic admin panel
- Request management
- Click tracking
- MySQL database integration
- External source links
- PHP
- MySQL
- HTML
- CSS
- Bootstrap
- JavaScript
- jQuery
- AJAX
This project is no longer actively maintained.
It was originally created as a practical exercise while learning PHP and relational databases. The repository is kept public as part of my development history and to show the type of applications I was experimenting with at the time.
The current implementation includes several outdated or incomplete patterns:
- Uses the deprecated
mysql_*PHP API - Does not use prepared statements
- Does not include production-ready authentication
- File uploads are not sufficiently secured
- User-generated content is not consistently escaped
- The database schema and setup process are not documented
- Some third-party services used by the project are no longer available
- The project may not run on modern PHP versions without significant changes
Because of these limitations, the application should not be deployed publicly in its current form.
This project helped me practise:
- Connecting PHP applications to MySQL
- Building database queries
- Processing HTML forms
- Handling file uploads
- Creating live search functionality with AJAX
- Returning server-generated content to the frontend
- Organising basic admin functionality
- Working with external APIs
- Building a complete small web application from frontend to backend
A modern version of this project would include:
- PHP 8 and PDO
- Prepared statements
- Secure authentication and sessions
- CSRF protection
- Secure image validation and storage
- Environment variables for configuration
- JSON API endpoints
- Improved project structure
- Database migrations
- Automated testing
- Better accessibility and responsive design
The application was designed to link to external programming resources.
It does not host book files directly. Any future version should only index books and resources that are freely and legally available from their original publishers or authors.