PHP Hacks

Credits

About the Author

Jack D. Herrington is a programmer who has been developing applications since he was 13, almost 25 years ago. Over the years, he has written in every major programming language and for every environment.

He is the author of three books. Code Generation in Action (Manning, 2002) covers using code to write code automatically. Many of the elements from that book appear in the database section of this book. In Podcasting Hacks (O’Reilly, 2005), he encourages his readers to create a citizen’s media through podcasting. His third book, PHP Hacks, is what you have in your hands.

He is the author of more than 30 articles ranging from PHP and code generation to podcasting, digital photography, and more. In one article for the O’Reilly Network, Jack had the audacity to propose that PHP was as apt at enterprise application development as Java or .NET. The ensuing comments battle extended onto Slashdot and continues to a small degree even today.

Jack lives with his wife Lori and daughter Megan in the San Francisco Bay Area. He works for a startup company named Leverage Software that specializes in social networking software. Before that, he was with Macromedia. He is an avid hiker, golfer, chef, woodworker, and (sometimes) origami artist when he isn’t hacking on PHP.

Contributors

The following people contributed hacks to this book:

Ross Shannon

Ross Shannon is a student from Dublin, Ireland, currently studying for a Ph.D. in computer science at University College Dublin.

Ross is a part-time web designer with a great interest in web technologies. He is the webmaster of a web design tutorial site, HTMLSource, which you can find at http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/.

Matthew Terenzio

Matt Terenzio has more than 10 years of technology and media experience. He holds a master’s degree in Internet engineering, and he has been lead architect on numerous projects for organizations, including The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

He has held the position of senior web producer for GreenwichTime. com and StamfordAdvocate.com for nearly five years and has contributed to a number of high-profile news sites including NYNewsday.com and OrlandoSentinel.com.

Most recently, Matt founded BuddyBuilder LLC, which has launched a number of Web 2.0 services, among them BuddyBuilder.com, Skinny-Farm.com, and Newsmarks.com.

Michael Mulligan

Michael Mulligan ([e-mail]) is a software engineer who earned his degree in computer science from the College of Engineering at Cornell University in 2005. He has worked in a variety of industries, ranging from small ventures to software engineering at Apple Computer. His main research interests lie in machine learning and vision.

In the summer of 2005, Mike married Dhipthi Devabose, his beautiful wife, and they settled in Florida. He now works full time as a software engineer at Lockheed Martin and is the author of myPhoto (http://agent0068.dyndns.org/~mike/projects/myPhoto/). For fun these days, he experiments with cooking new dishes and spends a lot of time with their new puppy, Siena.

Dru Nelson

Dru Nelson has been on the Internet since 1988. After starting an ISP in Florida, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and has been involved with large Internet infrastructure at companies like Four11 (Yahoo! Mail), Diva, eGroups (Yahoo! Groups), Danger, and Blue6. He is now at Plaxo.com doing Win32 software development. Dru has a blog at http://www.xxeo.com/.

Tyler Mitchell

Tyler Mitchell is a geographer and open source enthusiast. The author of Web Mapping Illustrated (O’Reilly, 2005), Tyler works as a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) manager for Timberline Forest Inventory Consultants and lives in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. He also is a regular speaker, moderator, and workshop leader at GIS conferences. His foray into the open source world began while looking for alternatives to proprietary mapping tools. He is now a devoted open source GIS advocate.

Peter Lavin

Peter Lavin runs a web development firm in Toronto. He has been published in a number of magazines and online sites, including UnixReview.com and Dr. Dobb’s Journal. He is currently writing a book on object-oriented PHP, soon to be published by No Starch Press. For more information, see http://softcoded.com/.