Title Details

Allan Kent has been programming seriously for the last 7 years and other than the single blemish when he achieved a Diploma in Cobol programming, is entirely self-taught. He started his career working at the local University and now runs his own company. Allan lives in Cape Town, South Africa with his girlfriend and 5 cats.

Chris Lea is one of the co-founders of Lucid Designs (http://www.luciddesigns.com), a Venice, CA based web design and development firm. He received a BS in Physics with Highest Honors and Distinction from UNC-CH in 1997, and has been hacking away with lots of (mostly open source) software since then. During his tenure with Lucid, he has worked on a wide variety of web site development projects ranging from the entertainment industry to the financial sector. When he's not staring at his monitor, you can usually find him swing dancing somewhere in the Los Angeles area. For more information, you can always check out his personal site at http://www.chrislea.com/.

Ganesh Prasad has worked in IT for 13 years, specializing in applications software design and development, in a number of countries including India, the United Arab Emirates, and Australia. He currently works for Reply2 Ltd., Australia, an e-CRM service provider. His experience covers IBM mainframes, VAX and UNIX minis, as well as Windows client/server and Web-based programming. Interests include Java and Open Source software, and his hope is that Open Source software will bring cheap computing to the masses and kick-start Third World economies. He is an Australian citizen, and lives in Sydney with his wife Sashi and son Lalit.

Chris Ullman is a Computer Science graduate who came to Wrox five years ago, when 14.4 modems were the hottest Internet technology and Netscape Navigator 2.0 was a groundbreaking innovation. Since then he's applied his knowledge of HTML, server-side web technologies, Java, and Visual Basic to developing, editing, and authoring books. When not trying to reconstruct the guts of his own PC or trying to write extra chapters in a hurry, he can be found either playing keyboards in psychedelic band, The Bee men, tutoring his cats in the way of eating peacefully from their own food bowl and not the one next to theirs, or hoping against hope that this is the year his favorite soccer team, Birmingham City, can manage to end their exile from the Premier League.

Jon Blank has been a part of the Linux world since before "Linux" was a buzzword, and has been programming (much to the detriment of his social life) in various languages for the better part of his life. He came to the PHP world by way of Perl, and came to Perl by way of The Web Union, an experimental Web hosting provider for students and non-profit organizations that he runs in his spare time. He currently lives in the New York City area, where he is trying to craft a stable career in a field where tempting offers are always around the corner. He doesn't think he'll succeed.
Jon's interests include online role-playing, vintage computers and video games, and graphics arts, as well as many sorts of programming. His primary focus as a programmer is on automation – convincing the computer to do the sort of boring and/or repetitive work that only a computer can stand.

Chapter 1. Installation.

Chapter 2. Writing PHP Programs.

Chapter 3. Getting Data from the Client.

Chapter 4. Decision Making.

Chapter 5. Loops and Arrays.

Chapter 6. Organizing Your Code.

Chapter 7. Handling and Avoiding Errors.

Chapter 8. Working With the Client.

Chapter 9. Objects.

Chapter 10. File and Directory Handling.

Chapter 11. PHP Database Connectivity.

Chapter 12. Retrieving Data from MySQL Using PHP.

Chapter 13. Manipulating Data in MySQL Using PHP.

Chapter 14. XML.

Chapter 15. E-Mail Handling.

Chapter 16. Generating Graphics.

Chapter 17. Case Study A URL Directory Manager.

Appendix A. ODBC.

Appendix B. PHP Functions.

Function Index.

Index.