Core PHP Programming

Core PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sites begins with an introduction to PHP that rapidly moves through the language's constructs. In his introduction, author Leon Atkinson provides a taste of PHP's variable usage, user input, conditional branching, and looping functions in a very concise chapter. A series of topical chapters follow, which explore the language in depth, presenting operators, statements, and concepts. User-defined functions, arrays, and classes are all covered, as is the often tricky topic of disk access.

Part II of the book comprises a topical summary of PHP's built-in functions. This section begins with I/O functions of all types, followed by an analysis of data manipulation and mathematical functions. The chapter on database functions provides a good feel for PHP's extensible nature by discussing programming issues involved with using databases such as dBase, IMAP, LDAP, MySQL, ODBC, Oracle, and Sybase. Throughout all of these chapters, the author is careful to provide digestible, real-world examples for every function.

The final two parts of the book present programming algorithms and basic concepts in application design. Atkinson provides reusable algorithms for sorting and searching, string manipulation, database access, and graphic generation. He discusses how to use PHP with HTML and create applications that are intelligently modular. The accompanying CD-ROM provides the source code for book examples, PHP, Apache, and other programs to get you rolling quickly with this intriguing language. --Stephen W. Plain