What is this book about? Beginning PHP5 is a complete tutorial in PHP5's language features and functionality, beginning with the basics and building up to the design and construction of complex data-driven Web sites. Fully functioning applications are developed through the course of the book. Other features of the book include installation guide and troubleshooting tips, introduction to relational databases, practical working examples and applications, and a detailed language reference. Here are the new topics in this edition: * OOP * PEAR * GTK * MSI * CLI * SQLite * Error handling with try/catch

Dave W. Mercer has 15 years' experience in industrial and process engineering, and systems analysis, and is CTO for a B2B, responsible for the development and deployment of online automated business services. His entire site hosting server, and the applications he builds for hosted clients are programmed in PHP using Postgres or MySQL as the database. Allan Kent is a PHP programmer who runs his own company and is a co-author of Beginning PHP 4. Alan has been programming seriously for the past dozen years and, other than the single blemish when he achieved a diploma in Cobol programming is entirely self-taught. Steven D. Nowicki is Director of Software development at The Content Project, a Santa Monica, California-based consulting firm currently developing a massive enterprise resource planning and contact management system comprising more than 300,000 lines of OOPHP code. He has a decade of experience in large-scale software development and system architecture on all major platforms. David Mercer is a PHP programmer and contributed to Beginning PHP 4. He has a keen interest in all things open source ever since he managed to put together a working Beowulf cluster by nicking old computer parts from colleagues and assembling them under his desk. He has worked on Wrox open source titles about PHP, Perl, and Linux. Dan Squier is a longtime contributor to the Wrox community and a PHP Programmer. Wankyu Choi is an accomplished PHP programmer and lead author of Beginning PHP 4. He holds a Master's degree in English/Korean interpretation and translation form the Graduate School of Translation & Interpretation. Heow Eide-Goodman is a member of NYPHP and LispNYC who uses PHP in his day job to doWeb sites, services, and back-office transformations among SQL Server, Interbase/Firebird, and MySQL. Edward Lecky-Thompson is the founder and director of Ashridge New Media, a professional new media technology consultancy based in Berkhamsted, just north of London, England. Self-described as "utterly obsessed with PHP," Ed has more than six years' experience in commercial software development and enterprise-level systems architecture across myriad platforms, with particularly strong exposure to PHP and Apache on Linux-based platforms. Clark Morgan is an experienced programmer who creates and administers databases with Web sites using PHP and MySQL for Fusion Computing and Media.

Introduction. Chapter 1: Getting Up and Running. Chapter 2: Writing Simple Programs. Chapter 3: PHP, HTML, and State. Chapter 4: Decisions, Loops, and Arrays. Chapter 5: Robust and Healthy Code. Chapter 6: Writing High-Quality Code. Chapter 7: Files and Directories. Chapter 8: XML. Chapter 9: An Introduction to Databases and SQL. Chapter 10: Retrieving Data from MySQL Using PHP. Chapter 11: Using PHP to Manipulate Data in MySQL. Chapter 12: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming. Chapter 13: Working with UML and Classes. Chapter 14: PEAR. Chapter 15: PHP5 and E-Mail. Chapter 16: Generating Graphics. Chapter 17: Case Study: A PHP Logging Agent. Appendix A: Answers. Appendix B: PHP Functions Reference. Appendix C: Using SQLite. Appendix D: ODBC. Appendix E: PHP CLI. Appendix F: Configuring PHP5. Index.