Core PHP Programming, Third Edition

Foreword

When I wrote the Foreword for Leon's second edition, PHP 4 had just started making it big, taking over the market share from PHP 3. The new version made great promises, and looking back it met all of its promises and more. We can see that at present PHP 4 has no doubt not only replaced almost all PHP 3 installations, but has conquered the Web application development market with its millions of installations and use in enterprise companies.

Today, we are again facing exciting times. PHP 5 is about to be released, promising major improvements to the growing PHP community. As with previous versions, the major improvements are at the language level. Zeev and I redesigned the object model—at last dumping the problematic model, which originated ...