O_Reilly_-_Learning_PHP_5.pdf

Learning PHP 5

By David Sklar

Ripped by: Lilmeanman

Dedication

To Jacob, who can look forward to so much learning.

Preface

Boring web sites are static . Interesting web sites are dynamic . That is, their content changes. A giant static HTML page

listing the names, pictures, descriptions, and prices of all 1,000 products a company has for sale is hard to use and takes

forever to load. A dynamic web product catalog that lets you search and filter those products so you see only the six items

that meet your price and category criteria is more useful, faster, and much more likely to close a sale.

The PHP programming language makes it easy to build dynamic web sites. Whatever interactive excitement you want to

create—such as a product catalog, a blog, a photo album, or an event calendar—PHP is up to the task. And after reading

this book, you'll be up to the task of building that dynamic web site, too.

Who This Book Is For

This book is for:

• A hobbyist who wants to create an interactive web site for himself, his family, or a nonprofit organization.

• A web site builder who wants to use the PHP setup provided by an ISP or hosting provider.

• A small business owner who wants to put her company on the Web.

• A page designer who wants to communicate better with her developer co-workers.

• A JavaScript whiz who wants to build server-side programs that complement her client-side code.

• A blogger or HTML jockey who wants to easily add dynamic features to her site.

• A Perl, ASP, or ColdFusion programmer who wants to get up to speed with PHP.

• Anybody who wants a straightforward, jargon-free introduction to one of the most popular programming languages

for building an interactive web site.

PHP's gentle learning curve and approachable syntax make it an ideal "gateway" language for the nontechnical web

professional. Learning PHP 5 is aimed at both this interested, intelligent, but not necessarily technical individual as well as

at programmers familiar with another language who want to learn PHP.

Aside from basic computer literacy (knowing how to type, moving files around, surfing the Web), the only assumption that

this book makes about you is that you're acquainted with HTML. You don't need to be an HTML master, but you should be

comfortable with the HTML tags that populate a basic web page such as <html> , <head> , <body> , <p> , <a> , and <br> . If

you're not familiar with HTML, read HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide , Fifth Edition, by Bill Kennedy and Chuck

Musciano (O'Reilly).

Contents of This Book

This book is designed so that you start at the beginning and work through the chapters in order. For the most part, each

chapter depends on material in the previous chapters. Chapter 2 , through Chapter 12 and Appendix B , each end with

exercises that test your understanding of the content in the chapter.

Chapter 1 , provides some general background on PHP and how it interacts with your web browser and a web server. It also

shows some PHP programs and what they do to give you an idea of what PHP programs look like. Especially if you're new

to programming or building dynamic web sites, it is important to read Chapter 1 .

The next four chapters give you a grounding in the fundamentals of PHP. Before you can write great literature, you need to

learn a little grammar and some vocabulary. That's what these chapters are for. (Don't worry—you'll learn enough PHP

grammar and vocabulary right away to start writing some short programs, if not great literature.) Chapter 2 shows you how

to work with different kinds of data such as pieces of text and numbers. This is important because the web pages that your

PHP programs generate are just big pieces of text. Chapter 3 , describes the PHP commands with which your programs can

make decisions. These decisions are at the heart of the "dynamic" in "dynamic web site." The concepts in Chapter 3 are

what you use, for example, to display only items in a product catalog that fall between two prices a user enters in a web

form.

Chapter 4 , introduces arrays , which are collections of a bunch of individual numbers or pieces of text. Many frequent

activities in PHP programs, such as processing submitted web form parameters or examining information pulled out of a

database, involve using arrays. As you write more complicated programs, you'll find yourself wanting to repeat similar

tasks. Functions , discussed in Chapter 5 , help you reuse pieces of your programs.

The three chapters after that cover three essential tasks in building a dynamic web site: dealing with forms, databases, and

users. Chapter 6 , supplies the details on working with web forms. These are the primary way that users interact with your

web site. Chapter 7 , discusses databases. A database holds the information that your web site displays, such as a product

catalog or event calendar. This chapter shows you how to make your PHP programs talk to a database. With the techniques

in Chapter 8 , your web site can do user-specific things such as display sensitive information to authorized people only or

tell someone how many new message board posts have been created since she last logged in.

Then, the next three chapters examine three other areas you're likely to encounter when building your web site. Chapter 9 ,

highlights the steps you need to take, for example, to display a monthly calendar or to allow users to input a date or time

from a web form. Chapter 10 , describes the PHP commands for interacting with files on your own computer or elsewhere

on the Internet. Chapter 11 , supplies the basics for dealing with XML documents in your PHP programs, whether you need

to generate one for another program to consume or you've been provided with one to use in your own program.

Chapter 12 and Chapter 13 each stand on their own. Chapter 12 , furnishes some approaches for understanding the error

messages that the PHP interpreter generates and hunting down problems in your programs. While it partially depends on

earlier material, it may be worthwhile to skip ahead and peruse Chapter 12 as you're working through the book.

Chapter 13 serves a taste of many additional capabilities of PHP, such as generating images, running code written in other

languages, and making Flash movies. After you've gotten comfortable with the core PHP concepts explained in Chapter 1

through Chapter 12 , visit Chapter 13 for lots of new things to learn.

The three appendixes provide supplementary material. To run PHP programs, you need to have a copy of the PHP

interpreter installed on your computer (or have an account with a web-hosting provider that supports PHP). Appendix A ,

helps you get up and running, whether you are using Windows, OS X, or Linux.

Many text-processing tasks in PHP, such as validating submitted form parameters or parsing an HTML document, are

made easier by using regular expressions , a powerful but initially inscrutable pattern matching syntax. Appendix B ,

explains the basics of regular expressions so that you can use them in your programs if you choose.

Last, Appendix C , contains the answers to all the exercises in the book. No peeking until you try the exercises!

Other Resources

The online annotated PHP Manual ( http://www.php.net/manual ) is a great resource for exploring PHP's extensive function

library. Plenty of user-contributed comments offer helpful advice and sample code, too. Additionally, there are many PHP

mailing lists covering installation, programming, extending PHP, and various other topics. You can learn about and

subscribe to these mailing lists at http://www.php.net/mailing-lists.php . A read-only web interface to the mailing lists is at

http://news.php.net . Also worth exploring is the PHP Presentation System archive at http://talks.php.net . This is a

collection of presentations about PHP that have been delivered at various conferences.

After you're comfortable with the material in this book, the following books about PHP are good next steps:

• Programming PHP , by Rasmus Lerdorf and Kevin Tatroe (O'Reilly). A more detailed and technical look at how to

write PHP programs. Includes information on generating graphics and PDFs.

• PHP Cookbook , by David Sklar and Adam Trachtenberg (O'Reilly). A comprehensive collection of common PHP

programming problems and their solutions.

• Essential PHP Tools , by David Sklar (Apress). Examples and explanations about many popular PHP add-on

libraries and modules including HTML_QuickForm, SOAP, and the Smarty templating system.

• Upgrading to PHP 5 , by Adam Trachtenberg (O'Reilly). A comprehensive look at the new features of PHP 5,

including coverage of features for XML handling and object-oriented programming.

These books are helpful for learning about databases, SQL, and MySQL:

• Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL , by David Lane and Hugh E. Williams (O'Reilly). How to make

PHP and MySQL sing in harmony to make a robust dynamic web site.

• SQL in a Nutshell , by Kevin E. Kline (O'Reilly). The essentials you need to know to write SQL queries. Covers the

SQL dialects used by Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL.

• MySQL Cookbook , by Paul DuBois (O'Reilly). A comprehensive collection of common MySQL tasks.

• MySQL Reference Manual ( http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql ). The ultimate source for information about MySQL's

features and SQL dialect.

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