did not know it as well as I thought.  Here we go through what character encoding is and get into mind-numbing detail about how to properly interact with it. Chapter 4: Streams Streams are probably one of the most underutilized features in PHP, though this is for good reason.  Few people will ever really get into streams in much depth.  That doesn't mean, however, that you have an excuse for not knowing them.  After this chapter, you will. Chapter 5: SPL SPL is not one of the most underutilized features, it IS the most underutilized feature.  Find out why. Chapter 6: Asynchronous Operations with Some Encryption Thrown In PHP does not do asynchronous execution; things like threading.  That doesn't mean that your application doesn't need it, or that you can't do it.  We look at a basic example here of what asynchronous execution could look like for your application. Chapter 7: Structured File Access Ever wanted to read a TAR file, or a WAV file, or something similar, but didn't know how to do it?  Ever want to read a raw EXT2 partition?  (hopefully not).  We look at several examples of how to read several different binary file types and look at how to build your own? Chapter 8: Daemons Ever want to build PHP to run in the background?  No?  Good.  You probably shouldn't.  But there are cases where this could actually be quite pertinent.   Here we go through some basics about how to build a PHP-based daemon. Chapter