PHP Essentials

The purpose of this book is bring the power and ease of use of PHP to anyone with a desire to learn PHP, and in doing so, join the tens of thousands of web developers who have already discovered the flexibility and productivity that comes with using PHP. The book is intended to cover all aspects of PHP. It begins by covering the history of PHP before providing a high level overview of how PHP works and why it is so useful to web developers. It then moves on to cover each area of PHP in detail, from the basics of the scripting language through to object oriented programming, file and filesystem handling and MySQL and SQLite database access. In addition, chapters are also provided covering the creation and handling of HTML based forms and maintaining state using cookies and PHP sessions. All topics are accompanied by extensive real world examples intended to bring theory to life.