September 2011
Intermediate to advanced
696 pages
21h 29m
English
Content preview from PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide, Fourth EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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12. Cookies and Sessions
In This Chapter
Making the Login Functions 371
Improving Session Security 396
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a stateless technology, meaning that each individual HTML page is an unrelated entity. HTTP has no method for tracking users or retaining variables as a person traverses a site. Without the server being able to track a user, there can be no shopping carts or custom Web-site personalization. Using a server-side technology like PHP, you can overcome the statelessness of the Web. The two best PHP tools for this purpose are cookies and sessions.
The key difference between cookies and sessions is that cookies store data in ...