Book Image

PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner's Guide

Book Image

PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

With the rise of Web 2.0, the need for a highly scalable database, capable of storing diverse user-generated content is increasing. MongoDB, an open-source, non-relational database has stepped up to meet this demand and is being used in some of the most popular websites in the world. MongoDB is one of the NoSQL databases which is gaining popularity for developing PHP Web 2.0 applications.PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner’s Guide is a fast-paced, hands-on guide to get started with web application development using PHP and MongoDB. The book follows a “Code first, explain later” approach, using practical examples in PHP to demonstrate unique features of MongoDB. It does not overwhelm you with information (or starve you of it), but gives you enough to get a solid practical grasp on the concepts.The book starts by introducing the underlying concepts of MongoDB. Each chapter contains practical examples in PHP that teache specific features of the database.The book teaches you to build a blogging application, handle user sessions and authentication, and perform aggregation with MapReduce. You will learn unique MongoDB features and solve interesting problems like real-time analytics, location-aware web apps etc. You will be guided to use MongoDB alongside MySQL to build a diverse data back-end. With its concise coverage of concepts and numerous practical examples, PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner’s Guide is the right choice for the PHP developer to get started with learning MongoDB.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
PHP and MongoDB Web Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Understanding MapReduce


MapReduce is a design pattern for data processing. The idea behind MapReduce is simple. A large task is broken down into smaller subtasks. Each subtask is performed independently. The results of all these subtasks are then combined to produce the final result. It should be obvious that MapReduce has two principal phases:

  • The map phase: Breakdown the task into smaller subtasks and execute them to produce intermediate results

  • The reduce phase: Combine the intermediate results and produce the final output

If you have done functional programming in the past, the idea should not be new to you. In the paradigm of functional programming, map() takes an array as an input and performs an operation on each element on the array. reduce()takes the result array of map() as its input and combines all the elements in that array into a single element by performing some operation. To elaborate the idea, consider the array of integers [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. We have to find the sum of...