This manual shows you how to use PHP and MySQL together to produce effective, dynamic interactive web sites. The book is aimed at being both practical and commercially focused, and includes numerous examples that demonstrate tasks such as authenticating users, constructing a shopping cart, generating PDF documents and images dynamically, sending and managing e-mail, facilitating user discussions and managing content.
Significant attention is paid to the importance of security.
Beyond covering the syntax and function library of PHP, the book also covers fundamental concepts that affect professional web-based software engineering. Some, such as maintainability, collaboration and testing, are issues that face software engineers working in any domain. Other concepts, such as authentication, encryption and session control are particularly important to Internet-based software projects. The CD contains source code developed in the book, PHP 4 source code and binaries, MySQL source code and binaries, and Apache source code and binaries.