Introduction
What Is PHP?
PHP is an open source, server-side, HTML-embedded web-scripting language that is compatible with all the major web servers (most notably Apache). PHP enables you to embed code fragments in normal HTML pages — code that is interpreted as your pages are served up to users. PHP also serves as a "glue" language, making it easy to connect your web pages to server-side databases.
Why PHP?
We devote nearly all of Chapter 1 to this question. The short answer is that it's free, it's open source, it's full featured, it's cross-platform, it's stable, it's fast, it's clearly designed, it's easy to learn, and it plays well with others.
What's New in This Edition?
This book is a new edition of the popular PHP Bible and PHP5 and MySQL Bible series. The book updates the elements from previous versions, where applicable, for PHP 6 and MySQL 6.
New PHP 6 features
Although much of PHP 5's functionality survives unchanged in PHP 6, there have been some changes. Among the ones we cover are:
Unicode support, making internationalization easier
Security enhancements such as removing safe_mode and register globals
Enhancements to the object-oriented interfaces
Who wrote the book?
The first two editions were by Converse and Park, with a guest chapter by Dustin Mitchell and tech editing by Richard Lynch. For the third edition, Clark Morgan took on much of the revision work, with help from Converse and Park as well as from David Wall and Chris Cornell, who also contributed chapters and did technical ...
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