I'm not sure if you've been reading along or not.. but, to quote myself (important things bolded):
to "make code work" without magic_quotes_gpc, you simply need to be aware of the dangers of trusting your user's input. any untrustworthy data (no user's input is ever trustworthy -- so this means all input) needs to be sanitised before being used within an SQL query, for example. this counts for inserts, selects, updates, deletes. if you aren't up to adopting a database extension that uses prepared statements (like PDO or MySQLi), you can use the function mysql_real_escape_string() instead.