PHP 5 Unleashed

Introduction

Welcome to PHP 5 Unleashed! The pages you now hold represent more than two years of research and writing, during which time every attempt was made to ensure the most technically accurate and complete PHP 5 book on the market today. It is my sincere hope that this book will find itself dog-eared from use in your home or office in the months to come.

I began my work with PHP back in mid 1997 when a friend introduced me to the language as “something kind of cool.” Being interested in Web development and the Internet in general, I was immediately hooked on the ease with which I could develop applications. I still remember the first time I wrote a script to query a MySQL database, producing a simple HTML table of its contents as vividly ...