David Sklar - PHP cookbook, 2nd Edition

This book is for programmers who need to solve problems with PHP. If you dont know any PHP, make this your second PHP book. The first should be Learning PHP 5 , also from OReilly.

If youre already familiar with PHP, this book helps you overcome a specific problem and get on with your life (or at least your programming activities.) The PHP Cookbook can also show you how to accomplish a particular task in PHP, such as sending email or writing a SOAP server, that you may already know how to do in another language. Programmers converting applications from other languages to PHP will find this book a trusty companion.

We dont expect that youll sit down and read this book from cover to cover (although well be happy if you do!). PHP programmers are constantly faced with a wide variety of challenges on a wide range of subjects. Turn to the PHP Cookbook when you encounter a problem you need to solve. Each recipe is a self-contained explanation that gives you a head start toward finishing your task. When a recipe refers to topics outside its scope, it contains pointers to related recipes and other online and offline resources.

If you choose to read an entire chapter at once, thats okay. The recipes generally flow from easy to hard, with example programs that put it all together at the end of many chapters. The chapter introduction provides an overview of the material covered in the chapter, including relevant background material, and points out a few highlighted recipes of special interest.

The book begins with four chapters about basic data types. Chapter 1 covers details like processing substrings, manipulating case, taking strings apart into smaller pieces, and parsing comma-separated data. Chapter 2 explains operations with floating-point numbers, random numbers, converting between bases, and number formatting. Chapter 3 shows you how to manipulate dates and times, format them, handle time zones and daylight saving time, and find time to microsecond precision. Chapter 4 covers array operations like iterating, merging, reversing, sorting, and extracting particular elements.

Next are three chapters that discuss program building blocks. Chpater 5 covers notable features of PHPs variable handling, such as default values, static variables, and producing string representations of complex data types. The recipes in Chpater 6 deal with using functions in PHP: processing arguments, passing and returning variables by reference, creating functions at runtime, and scoping variables. Chapter 7 covers PHPs object-oriented capabilities, with recipes on OOP basics as well as PHP 5s new features, such as magic methods, destructors, access control, and reflection.

After the data types and building blocks come six chapters devoted to topics that are central to web programming. Chapter 8 covers cookies, headers, authentication, working with query strings, and other fundamentals of web applications. Chapter 9 covers processing and validating form input, displaying multipage forms, showing forms with error messages, and guarding against problems such as cross-site scripting and multiple submission of the same form. Chapter 10 explains the differences between DBM and SQL databases and, using PHP 5s PDO database access abstraction layer, shows how to connect to a database, assign unique ID values, retrieve rows, change data, escape quotes, and log debugging information. Chapter 11 covers PHPs built-in sessions module, which lets you maintain information about a user as he moves from page to page on your web site. This chapter also highlights some of the security issues associated with sessions. Chapter 12 discusses all things XML: PHP 5s SimpleXML extension and revamped DOM functions, using XPath and XSLT, and reading and writing both RSS and Atom feeds. Chapter 13 explores topics useful to PHP applications that integrate with external web sites and client-side JavaScript such as retrieving remote URLs, cleaning up HTML, and responding to an Ajax request.

The next three chapters are all about network interaction. Chapter 14 details the ins and outs of consuming a web serviceusing an external REST, SOAP, or XML-RPC service from within your code. Chapter 15 handles the other side of the web services equationserving up REST, SOAP, or XML-RPC requests to others. Both chapters discuss WSDL, authentication, headers, and error handling. Chapter 16 discusses other network services such as sending email messages, using LDAP, and doing DNS lookups.