Core PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sites (2nd Edition)

Revised for PHP version 4, the new edition of Core PHP Programming is a comprehensive tutorial and reference to one of today's hottest scripting languages. Part tutorial and part reference, this book will get beginners started with PHP, as well as provide a convenient desktop resource for more experienced PHP developers.

Early sections show what PHP is and how it works, with basic data types, flow control, and other topics you'll need to get started. But the heart of the book is a full reference to PHP 4 functions. Organized by topic, this text provides over 400 pages of reference to several hundred PHP calls, along with a description of what they do. Clearly organized and presented, this book will help you find what you need quickly (instead of relying on PHP's often cumbersome online help). In particular, readers will appreciate the coverage of database functions, including the separate calls for MySQL, ODBC, and Oracle. You'll also see what PHP can do with XML.

The last part of the book reverts to tutorial mode, first with a section on algorithms that discusses ways to sort and search PHP arrays. Final sections look at some strategies you can use to integrate PHP into the software design process, in which the strategies of combining HTML content with dynamic PHP scripts are shown. There is also useful advice for increasing performance with PHP. (It would seem that upgrading to PHP 4 is a must, because the new version offers a real performance boost.)

PHP is clearly a popular choice for Web applications today. If you buy just one book on PHP, consider Core PHP Programming. It offers an approachable tutorial that will put basic PHP script development into the hands of beginners, and provides a useful reference for everyday development once you've gotten a handle on how to use it. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

• History and introduction to PHP
• Installing PHP on Apache/Unix and IIS/NT
• PHP script basics
• PHP language tutorial (including data types, variables, and operators)
• Flow control statements
• PHP functions (arguments, recursion, and dynamic function calls)
• Single and multidimensional arrays
• PHP classes
• Creating Web pages in PHP
• Environment variables
• File uploads and file I/O
• PHP session management
• PHP function reference
• I/O functions (including files and compressed files, session handling, network I/O, and FTP)
• Data functions (including arrays, hashing, strings, and regular expressions)
• Mathematical functions
• Date and time functions
• Image functions
• Database functions (including support for MySQL, ODBC, Oracle, and Postgres)
• Miscellaneous functions (including XML functions)
• Algorithms for sorting and searching in PHP
• Parsing and tokenizing strings
• Database programming how-to
• Authenticating
• Sending e-mail
• Software engineering basics with PHP
• Integrating PHP and HTML
• Using CVS for version control
• Optimization hints