Sklar David - PHP Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for PHP Programmers

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 OK. 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. covers array operations like iterating, merging, reversing, sorting, and extracting particular elements.

Next are three chapters that discuss program building blocks. covers PHPs object-oriented capabilities, with recipes on OOP basics as well as more advanced features, such as magic methods, destructors, access control, reflection, traits, and namespaces.

After the data types and building blocks come six chapters devoted to topics that are central to web programming. explores topics useful to PHP applications that integrate with external websites 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. discusses other network services such as sending email messages, using LDAP, and doing DNS lookups.

The next section of the book is a series of chapters on features and extensions of PHP that help you build applications that are robust, secure, user-friendly, and efficient. covers regular expressions, including capturing text inside of HTML tags, calling a PHP function from inside a regular expression, and using greedy and nongreedy matching.

Chapters deals with directories and file metadata, with recipes on changing file permissions and ownership, moving or deleting a file, and processing all files in a directory.

Last, there are two chapters on topics that extend the reach of what PHP can do. shows you how to install and upgrade them.