PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy
What made the first edition of "PHP Solutions" my most popular book was that I wrote it with PHP 5 in mind at a time when most websites were still hosted on PHP 4 servers. So, when friends of ED asked me to prepare a second edition, I thought it would be a simple task -- just remove the PHP 4 material, and add some new techniques. How wrong I was!The decision to drop support for PHP 4 was liberating. I realized that some tasks, such as uploading files and creating thumbnails, could be much better handled by custom classes. I hadn't been able to do that in the first edition because classes in PHP 4 and PHP 5 are mutually incompatible. The classes break complex tasks into simple, easy-to-understand operations. Better still, all the code is project-neutral, so you can reuse the classes in other websites by writing no more than a dozen lines of code -- sometimes less.Although the book retains the original structure of the first edition, all the code has been completely rewritten, making it cleaner and more efficient. Other new features include displaying the results of a news feed using SimpleXML and the Standard PHP Library (SPL). There's also detailed coverage of the date and time classes introduced in PHP 5.2 and 5.3. The chapter on working with multiple database tables has been expanded to explain how to implement foreign key constraints in InnoDB, the default storage engine in MySQL 5.5.This new edition requires PHP 5.2 and MySQL 4.1 or later. The code won't work in earlier versions.Please note that the example files for the book are now located on the main Apress website. The friends of ED address on page xvii is no longer valid.