Chapter 22. Using Session Control in PHP

In this chapter, we discuss the session control functionality in PHP.

Key topics covered in this chapter include

  • What session control is

  • Cookies

  • Steps in setting up a session

  • Session variables

  • Sessions and authentication

What Session Control Is

You might have heard people say that “HTTP is a stateless protocol.” This means that the protocol has no built-in way of maintaining state between two transactions. When a user requests one page, followed by another, HTTP does not provide a way for you to tell that both requests came from the same user.

The idea of session control is to be able to track a user during a single session on a website. If you can do this, you can easily support logging in a user and showing ...

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