Popel - Learning PHP Data Objects

Dennis Popel is an experienced PHP/PHP 5 developer currently working for an Australian web development company, Motive Media (www.motivemedia.com.au). Serving Sun Microsystems Australia, Luna Park Sydney, Alsco Holdings, and Pine Solutions, among others, Dennis leads company development of proprietary, web-based, software solutions. In his spare time, he runs the www.onphp5.com blog and works on an online RSS aggregator newzmix.com.

Dennis Popel has been developing with PHP for more than 5 years and is experienced in such fields as object-oriented design and MVC. Previously he has worked at Rapid Intelligence, another Australian-based web company, publisher of such popular titles as NationMaster.com, FactBites.com, and Qwika.com. In the past, Dennis was developing proprietary Java applications.

This book is devoted to all the people who introduced and guided me in this wonderful world of information technology.

Dinangkur Kundu completed his bachelor's degree in Information Technology from Central Queensland University, Australia. He has been working as a software engineer and network admindesigning, developing, and configuring. He has worked with a variety of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation languages. He has worked with flat files, indexed files, hierarchical databases, network databases, and relational databases, several Sun and HP servers to configure small and medium range office networks providing Internet service, Mail service, file share service, network-based printing service, backup service, and implementing several network-based applications. Currently, he works as Chief Technical Officer at Quantumcloud, developing and customizing LAMP- and WAMP-based web services. He enjoys producing high-quality software, web-based solutions, and designing secure network.

I would like to thank my family for supporting and inspiring my ongoing passion for software development and the resultant challenges of life near the bleeding edge. I would also like to thankMr. Jamil and Mr. Hasin, my close professional mentors andwho to this day remain close friends. You can contact me at<>

Tahmid Munaz is currently working in Relisource Technologies (www.relisource.com) as an SQA Engineer. He is also a volunteer in an association called SQABD (SQA Bangladeshwww.sqabd.com) as a Community Relations Manager. He has experience in conducting QA and Testing training and mentoring freshers for Testing and QA Career paths and Consulting.

He loves to keep in touch with other Technical Communities likeJPGroup, Dot_net_community, PHPExpert, and PHPResource. He is addicted to reading blogs and writing when he gets time. You can visit Tahmid's blog at http://tahmidmunaz.blogspot.com

I would like to thank Hasin, the author of "Wordpress Complete", who always inspired me. Thanks to my friend Mizan, the author of "MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide", who helped me in my reviewing as it was first time for me. Thanks to the Packt team for giving me the support for this startup, especially to Viraj, Rashmi, and Abhijeet. I really enjoyed reviewing and hope to do better in future. I had heard about the author of this book but had no chance to work together. It was a chance for me to work with him and feel proud to help him make a nice book. I would like to thank my Program Managers who have always helped me to do and learn in better ways: Sahadatul Hakim (Enosis Solutions).

This book will introduce you to one of the most important extensions to PHP that are available, starting with PHP version 5.0the PHP Data Objects, commonly known as PDO.

PHP grew in to a very popular web programming language due to its simplicity and ease of use. One of the key factors of this growing success is the built-in possibility to access many popular relational database management systems (RDBMS), such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, to name just a few. Today, most of the existing and newly created web applications interconnect with these databases to produce dynamic, data-driven websites.

While most PHP-enabled web servers are still running PHP versions prior to 5.0, the enhancements and performance improvements introduced with this new version will lead to wide acceptance of PHP 5 at all levels during coming years. This imposes the need to start familiarizing ourselves with all the advanced features available in this version today.