When it comes to creating dynamic web sites, the open source PHP language is red-hot property: used on more than 20 million web sites today, PHP is now more popular than Microsoft's ASP.NET technology. With our Cookbook's unique format, you can learn how to build dynamic web applications that work on any web browser. This revised new edition makes it easy to find specific solutions for programming challenges. PHP Cookbook has a wealth of solutions for problems that you'll face regularly. With topics that range from beginner questions to advanced web programming techniques, this guide contains practical examples — or "recipes" — for anyone who uses this scripting language to generate dynamic web content. Updated for PHP 5, this book provides solutions that explain how to use the new language features in detail, including the vastly improved object-oriented capabilities and the new PDO data access extension. New sections on classes and objects are included, along with new material on processing XML, building web services with PHP, and working with SOAP/REST architectures. With each recipe, the authors include a discussion that explains the logic and concepts underlying the solution.

In this book for web programmers using PHP, the authors address frequently encountered challenges in the form of approximately 250 "recipes"--each a complete PHP template for achieving a specific result. The recipes are easily navigated and grouped by functions such as dates and times, graphics, error management, security and encryption, and web automation. Some specific tasks include finding and fixing parse errors; drawing lines, rectangles and polygons; getting and putting up files with FTP; and processing variable-length text fields. Updates in this second edition include new sections on processing XML, and building web services using PHP. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)