PHP website" books out there.  However, there are only a bare handful of books that go beyond that.  So many PHP books have good information for getting started but end up stopping right when the problems start getting interesting.  That's what I did with this book.  I undertook a smaller group of topics, but took them to their conclusion, in most cases.  Some of them, because it would become repetitive, I did not, but for the most part I started at the beginning and went to the end insofar as the end was a logical conclusion.  So, end as in "I showed what I intended to show". Here are the chapters with a brief summary of each. Chapter 1: Networking and Sockets Few people really get into the raw networking side of PHP, for good reason.  But having a good understanding of how networking works is quite pertinent to a PHP developer.  Here we go through different types of sockets and how you can handle network communication. Chapter 2: Binary Protocols Most PHP developers are really good with text.  XML, HTML, JavaScript, etc.  However, there is a world of integration that is available if you know how to integrate with binary network protocols.  In this chapter we look at a few along with showing how you can easily hack a network protocol. Chapter 3: Character Encoding Think you know about things like UTF-8?  I thought so too until I had to really get into it.  Then I realized that I