Contents of This Book

This book is designed so that you start at the beginning and work through the chapters in order. For the most part, each chapter depends on material in the previous chapters. Chapter 2, through Chapter 12 and Appendix B, each end with exercises that test your understanding of the content in the chapter.

Chapter 1, provides some general background on PHP and how it interacts with your web browser and a web server. It also shows some PHP programs and what they do to give you an idea of what PHP programs look like. Especially if you're new to programming or building dynamic web sites, it is important to read Chapter 1.

The next four chapters give you a grounding in the fundamentals of PHP. Before you can write great literature, you need to learn a little grammar and some vocabulary. That's what these chapters are for. (Don't worry—you'll learn enough PHP grammar and vocabulary right away to start writing some short programs, if not great literature.) Chapter 2 shows you how to work with different kinds of data such as pieces of text and numbers. This is important because the web pages that your PHP programs generate are just big pieces of text. Chapter 3, describes the PHP commands with which your programs can make decisions. These decisions are at the heart of the "dynamic" in "dynamic web site." The concepts in Chapter 3 are what you use, for example, to display only items in a product catalog that fall between two prices a user enters in a web form.

Chapter 4, introduces arrays, which are collections of a bunch of individual numbers or pieces of text. Many frequent activities in PHP programs, such as processing submitted web form parameters or examining information pulled out of a database, involve using arrays. As you write more complicated programs, you'll find yourself wanting to repeat similar tasks. Functions, discussed in Chapter 5, help you reuse pieces of your programs.

The three chapters after that cover three essential tasks in building a dynamic web site: dealing with forms, databases, and users. Chapter 6, supplies the details on working with web forms. These are the primary way that users interact with your web site. Chapter 7, discusses databases. A database holds the information that your web site displays, such as a product catalog or event calendar. This chapter shows you how to make your PHP programs talk to a database. With the techniques in Chapter 8, your web site can do user-specific things such as display sensitive information to authorized people only or tell someone how many new message board posts have been created since she last logged in.

Then, the next three chapters examine three other areas you're likely to encounter when building your web site. Chapter 9, highlights the steps you need to take, for example, to display a monthly calendar or to allow users to input a date or time from a web form. Chapter 10, describes the PHP commands for interacting with files on your own computer or elsewhere on the Internet. Chapter 11, supplies the basics for dealing with XML documents in your PHP programs, whether you need to generate one for another program to consume or you've been provided with one to use in your own program.

Chapter 12 and Chapter 13 each stand on their own. Chapter 12, furnishes some approaches for understanding the error messages that the PHP interpreter generates and hunting down problems in your programs. While it partially depends on earlier material, it may be worthwhile to skip ahead and peruse Chapter 12 as you're working through the book.

Chapter 13 serves a taste of many additional capabilities of PHP, such as generating images, running code written in other languages, and making Flash movies. After you've gotten comfortable with the core PHP concepts explained in Chapter 1 through Chapter 12, visit Chapter 13 for lots of new things to learn.

The three appendixes provide supplementary material. To run PHP programs, you need to have a copy of the PHP interpreter installed on your computer (or have an account with a web-hosting provider that supports PHP). Appendix A, helps you get up and running, whether you are using Windows, OS X, or Linux.

Many text-processing tasks in PHP, such as validating submitted form parameters or parsing an HTML document, are made easier by using regular expressions, a powerful but initially inscrutable pattern matching syntax. Appendix B, explains the basics of regular expressions so that you can use them in your programs if you choose.

Last, Appendix C, contains the answers to all the exercises in the book. No peeking until you try the exercises!