Jump Start PHP

Chapter 2PHP & Data

Data is the lifeblood of PHP. In this chapter, we'll look at one of the many options that PHP offers to developers in terms of processing data and using permanent storage solutions—interacting with a MySQL database. In addition, we'll briefly explore some important programming concepts, like conditional statements and loops, which become necessary when reading data back from a database. So get ready and roll up your sleeves; we're going to dive deep into the world of PHP data handling!

Operators

In PHP, just as in almost all programming languages, operators are used to manipulate or perform various operations on variables and values. The most basic operator is =, which as we saw in Chapter 1 is used to assign a value to a ...