In this concise, hands-on tutorial, PHP expert Christopher Cosentino delivers dozens of powerful new techniques for building serious Web applications. Through professional-quality examples drawn from his six years as a PHP developer, Cosentino walks you through building friendlier, more usable sites; improving user authentication; generating dynamic graphics; parsing XML documents; building database-independent Web applications; and much more!

• Build complex, PHP-driven Web sites—fast!
• Discover powerful new PHP techniques, hands on!
• Learn all-new techniques based on PHP-GTK and PEAR::DB
• Master XML parsing, user authentication, forms processing, data mining, and much more

Take your PHP programming skills to the next level!

So...you've been asked to pitch in on a PHP project...starting now. Or maybe one's on the horizon. Or maybe you need to get real PHP skills onto your r�sum�. You've done web stuff. Maybe used other scripting languages. Now you want to get productive with PHP, fast.

Welcome. We wrote this book for you. We'll leverage what you already know, so you'll go further, faster than you ever expected.

You'll get the real nuts and bolts, not theory or hooey. You'll learn through dozens of focused examples: tested for reliability, crafted for clarity, easy to adapt for your own projects.

Need specific solutions? This book's modular, high-efficiency format delivers them—instantly. Award-winning author Steven Holzner draws on his unparalleled experience teaching programming: No other PHP guide covers this much, this well, this quickly. Dig in, get started, get results—today!

• All you need to succeed with PHP in Linux or Windows

• Master core concepts: operators, flow control, strings, arrays, functions, and more

• Learn essential web techniques: cookies, session management, automated email, FTP, and more

• Use PHP 5's object model and object-oriented techniques

• Efficiently handle text boxes, buttons, and other HTML controls

• Create web forms, validate user input, and check browsers

• Work with MySQL and other databases

PHP Functions Essential Reference is a detailed and practical funtion reference for the PHP programming language. Concise and authoritative, this working programmer's guide covers the core function groups plus 300 additional commonly used PHP functions, and details 800 more functions on the book's web site, php-er.com. Written by working developers and PHP community leaders, this book is full of working code that utilizes the rich variety of functions available with PHP. Every function is supported by one or more examples that illustrate the function in action. This definitive guide to PHP is a must-have for any serious PHP programmer. If you're a programmer looking for the most effective uses of PHP, this book will provide you with:

• A clear guide to common function usage and pitfalls
• Easy to find, detailed information on the most important PHP functions
• Practical examples of each function's use
• Overview's that discuss how and why to use a particular group of functions
• Practical, complete documentation on powerful but obscure functions such as pack and unpack
• Detailed writeups on critical PHP extensions such as MySQL, core language functions like the class object, string, and variable-related functions, and new language features such as ticks

Apache, MySQL, PHP3, and IMP<193> the pieces exist. Each piece has been described ad nauseam. What does not exist is a guide to the marriage of these software technologies into a useful book, until now. This book puts together information on installing, setting up, and troubleshooting each of these technologies into one complete volume. You also learn how each piece is part of a whole by learning, step-by-step, how to create a web-based e-mail system. Learn to run the Linux equivalent of Active Server Pages (ASP) using PHP3, set up an e-commerce site using a database and the Apache web server, and create a data entry system (such as sales, product quality tracking, customer preferences, etc) that requires no installation in the PC.

The PHP Anthology: Object Oriented PHP Solutions is a complete reference guide for any PHP developer—hobbyist or professional—to help you write better, faster and more secure code that solves common problems. The author, Harry Fuecks, has compiled over 100 best-practice solutions that any developer will find invaluable when building content management systems, intranets, shopping carts or anything else.