PHP Essentials

The purpose of this book is bring the power and ease of use of PHP to anyone with a desire to learn PHP. It starts by covering the history of PHP before providing a high level overview of how PHP works and why it is so useful to web developers. It then moves on to cover each area of PHP in detail, from the basics of the scripting language through to object oriented programming, file and file system handling and MySQL and SQLite database integration. In addition, chapters are also provided covering the creation and handling of HTML based forms and maintaining state using both cookies and PHP sessions. Each topic area is accompanied by extensive real world examples intended to bring theory to life.