MongoDB and PHP

Preface

Once every decade or so, a technology comes along that is so revolutionary that it fundamentally alters the way we approach everything we do. The world itself has changed. As I think back to 1995 when I first started developing Internet applications, our data needs were relatively simple. For the next 10 years, little changed; more and more people were using the Internet, and consequently data stores needed to scale to larger workloads, but caching largely took care of that, as all users were accessing the same set of data. As social media came to fruition, it was clear that the approach that had worked for the prior 30 years was not longer sufficient. In the future, all data and experience would need to be personalized—on a large scale. It was out of this need that MongoDB was created. A database for today’s applications, a database for today’s challenges, a database for today’s scale: MongoDB has that disruptive potential that will fundamentally change the way you approach developing applications.

I’d like to publicly thank my wife and four children for being patient with me as I spent most of my free time over the past few months writing this book.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, ...