PHP and ASP/ASP.NET have emerged as the two primary applicationdevelopment frameworks for developing web applications. PHP is opensource, and it is the most popular Apache module in use, by far. This bookcovers the key topics that developers familiar with basic PHP syntax need tomaster to become fully productive and effective with PHP 5. These topicsinclude customizing PHP through writing PHP extensions, object-orientedPHP programming, using and building PEAR components, PHP shellscripting, and XML with PHP. Simply put: Readers will understand how toextend PHP to meet the needs of any development project, no matter howcomplex

Back CoverThe definitive introduction for today’s most powerful PHP 5 techniques

In this book, PHP 5’s co-creator and two leading PHPdevelopers show you how to make the most of PHP 5’s industrial-strengthenhancements in any project -- no matterhow large or complex. Their unique insights and realistic examples illuminatePHP 5’s new object model, powerful design patterns, improved XML Web servicessupport, and much more. Whether you’re creating Web applications, extensions,packages, or shell scripts -- or migrating PHP 4 code -- here are high-poweredsolutions you won’t find anywhere else.

• Review PHP’s syntax and master its object-oriented capabilities-- from properties and methods to polymorphism, interfaces, and reflection

• Master the four most important design patterns for PHPdevelopment

• Write powerful Web applications: handle input, cookies, sessionextension, and more

• Integrate with MySQL, SQLite, and other database engines

• Provide efficient error handling that’s transparent to your users

• Leverage PHP 5’s improved XML support -- including parsing, XSLTconversions, and more

• Build XML-based Web services with XML-RPC and SOAP

• Make the most of PEAR: work with the repository, use keypackages, and create your own

• Upgrade PHP 4 code to PHP 5 -- compatibility issues, techniques,and practical workarounds

• Improve script performance: tips and tools for PHP optimization

• Use PHP extensions to handle files/streams, regular expressions,dates/times, and graphics

• Create original extensions and shell scripts

If you’re a software developer new to PHP, you’ll leapquickly into PHP and its new object-oriented capabilities. If you’re anexperienced PHP programmer, you already recognize PHP’s convenience andsimplicity. Now, discover all of its extraordinary power!

About the Software

At this book’s exclusive, private link to Zend.com, downloada fully functional 90-day version of Zend Studio IDE, today’s breakthrough toolfor developing, managing, and debugging PHP code.

Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series is a definitive series ofLinux and Open Source books by the world’s leading Linux software developers.Bruce Perens is the primary author of The Open Source Definition, the formativedocument of the open source movement and the former Debian GNU/Linux Project Leader.

Preface Preface "The best security against revolution is in constant correction of abuses and the introduction of needed improvements. It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary." Richard Whately In the Beginning It was eight years ago, when Rasmus Lerdorf first started developing PHP/FI. He could not have imagined that his creation would eventually lead to the development of PHP as we know it today, which is being used by millions of people. The first version of "PHP/FI," called Personal Homepage Tools/Form Interpreter, was a collection of Perl scripts in 1995. 1 One of the basic features was a Perl-like language for handling form submissions, but it lacked many common useful language features, such as loops. PHP/FI 2 A rewrite came with PHP/FI 2 2 in 1997, but at that time the development was almost solely handled by Rasmus. After its release in November of that year, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski bumped into PHP/FI while looking for a language to develop an e-commerce solution as a university project. They discovered that PHP/FI was not quite as powerful as it seemed, and its language was lacking many common features. One of the most interesting aspects included the way loops were implemented. The hand-crafted lexical scanner would go through the script and when it hit the while keyword it would remember its position in the file. At the end of the loop, the file pointer sought back to the saved position, and the whole loop was reread and re-executed. PHP 3 Zeev and Andi decided to completely rewrite the scripting language. They then teamed up with Rasmus to release PHP 3, and along also came a new name: PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, to emphasize that PHP was a different product and not only suitable for personal use. Zeev and Andi had also designed and implemented a new extension API. This new API made it possible to easily support additional extensions for performing tasks such as accessing databases, spell checkers and other technologies, which attracted many developers who were not part of the "core" group to join and contribute to the PHP project. At the time of PHP 3 s release 3 in June 1998, the estimated PHP installed base consisted of about 50,000 domains. PHP 3 sparked the beginning of PHP s real breakthrough, and was the first version to have an installed base of more than one million domains. PHP 4 In late 1998, Zeev and Andi looked back at their work in PHP 3 and felt they could have written the scripting language even better, so they started yet another rewrite. While PHP 3 still continuously parsed the scripts while executing them, PHP 4 came with a new paradigm of "compile first, execute later." The compilation step does not compile PHP scripts into machine code; it instead compiles them into byte code, which is then executed by the Zend Engine (Zend stands for Ze ev and A nd i), the new heart of PHP 4. Because of this new way of executing scripts, the performance of PHP 4 was much better than that of PHP 3, with only a small amount of backward compatibility breakage 4 . Among other improvements was an improved extension API for better run-time performance, a web server abstraction layer allowing PHP 4 to run on most popular web servers, and lots more. PHP 4 was officially released on May 22, 2002, and today its installed base has surpassed 15 million domains. In PHP 3, the minor version number (the middle digit) was never used, and all versions were numbered as 3.0.x. This changed in PHP 4, and the minor version number was used to denote important changes in the language. The first important change came in PHP 4.1.0, 5 which introduced superglobals such as and . Superglobals can be accessed from within functions without having to use the keyword. This feature was added in order to allow the register_globals INI option to be turned off. register_globals is a feature in PHP which automatically converts input variables like "?foo=bar" in [a href="http://php.net/?foo=bar" target="_blank">http://php.net/?foo=bar to a PHP variable called $foo. Because many people do not check input variables properly, many applications had security holes, which made it quite easy to circumvent security and authentication code. With the new superglobals in place, on April 22, 2002, PHP 4.2.0 was released with the register_globals turned off by default. PHP 4.3.0, the last significant PHP 4 version, was released on December 27, 2002. This version introduced the Command Line Interface (CLI), a revamped file and network I/O layer (called streams ), and a bundled GD library. Although most of those additions have no real effect on end users, the major version was bumped due to the major changes in PHP s core. PHP 5 Soon after, the demand for more common object-oriented features increased immensely, and Andi came up with the idea of rewriting the objected-oriented part of the Zend Engine. Zeev and Andi wrote the "Zend Engine II: Feature Overview and Design" document 6 and jumpstarted heated discussions about PHP s future. Although the basic language has stayed the same, many features were added, dropped, and changed by the time PHP 5 matured. For example, namespaces and multiple inheritance, which were mentioned in the original document, never made it into PHP 5. Multiple inheritance was dropped in favor of interfaces, and namespaces were dropped completely. You can find a full list of new features in Chapter, "What Is New in PHP 5?" PHP 5 is expected to maintain and even increase PHP s leadership in the web development market. Not only does it revolutionizes PHP s object-oriented support but it also contains many new features which make it the ultimate web development platform. The rewritten XML functionality in PHP 5 puts it on par with other web technologies in some areas and overtakes them in others, especially due to the new SimpleXML extension which makes it ridiculously easy to manipulate XML documents. In addition, the new SOAP, MySQLi, and variety of other extensions are significant milestones in PHP s support for additional technologies. Audience This book is an introduction to the advanced features new to PHP 5. It is written for PHP programmers who are making the move to PHP 5. Although Chapter 2, "PHP 5 Basic Language," contains an introduction to PHP 5 syntax, it is meant as a refresher for PHP programmers and not as a tutorial for new programmers. However, web developers with experience programming other high-level languages may indeed find that this tutorial is all they need in order to begin working effectively with PHP 5. Chapter Overview Chapter 1, "What Is New in PHP 5?" discusses the new features in PHP 5. Most of these new features deal with new object-oriented features, including small examples for each feature. It also gives an overview of the new extensions in PHP 5. Most of the topics mentioned in this chapter are explained in more detail in later chapters. Chapter 2, "PHP 5 Basic Language," introduces the PHP syntax to those readers not familiar with PHP. All basic language constructs and variable types are explained along with simple examples to give the reader the necessary building blocks to build real scripts. Chapter 3, "PHP 5 OO Language," continues exploring PHP 5 s syntax, focusing on its object-oriented functionality. This chapter covers basics, such as properties and methods, and progresses to more complicated subjects, such as polymorphism, interfaces, exceptions, and lots more. Using the previous chapter as a foundation, Chapter 4, "PHP 5 Advanced OOP and Design Patterns," covers some of the most advanced features of PHP 5 s object model. After learning these features, including four commonly used design patterns and PHP s reflection capabilities, you will soon become an OO wizard. Now that you are familiar with the syntax and language features of PHP, Chapter 5, "How to Write a Web Application with PHP," introduces you to the world of writing web applications. The authors show you basics, such as handling input through form variables and safety techniques, but this chapter also includes more advanced topics, such as handling sessions with cookies and PHP s session extension. You also find a few tips on laying out your source code for your web applications. Chapter 6, "Databases with PHP 5," introduces using MySQL, SQLite, and Oracle from PHP, but focuses primarily on the PHP 5-specific details of database access. For each database, you learn about some of its strong and weak points, as well as the types of applications at which each excels. And of course, you learn how to interface with them using PHP s native functions or using PEAR DB. All scripts can throw errors, but of course you do not want them to show up on your web site once your application has passed its development state. Chapter 7, "Error Handling," deals with different types of errors that exist, how to handle those errors with PHP, and how to handle errors with PEAR. As one of the important new features in PHP 5 is its renewed XML support, a chapter on XML features in PHP 5 could not be missed. Chapter 8, "XML with PHP 5," talks about the different strategies of parsing XML and converting XML to other formats with XSLT. XML-RPC and SOAP are introduced to show you how to implement web services with both techniques. Although not specifically for PHP 5, the five mainstream extensions that Chapter 9,"Mainstream Extensions," covers are important enough to deserve a place in this book. The first section, "Files and Streams," explains about handling files and network streams. A stream is nothing more than a way to access external data, such as a file, remote URL, or compressed file. The second section, "Regular Expressions," explains the syntax of a regular expression engine (PCRE) that PHP uses with numerous examples to show you how these expressions can make your life easier. In "Date Handling," we explain the different functions used to parse and format date and time strings. In "Graphics Manipulation with GD," we show you through two real-life scenario...

Get your hands dirty good
This is a great book covering a lot of the advanced features of PHP and how to use them in your scripts. There are a lot of examples and this books teaches a lot about OOP and various design patterns. This book is very well written and easy to understand.

Multiple Talents Or Just Plain Scam?
I have read the review below by P. N. Payne about the paid reviews. Immediately, I checked on the "See All My Reviews" link for Herrington, Boudville, and Matlock. Here’s what I found_
Herrington: Reviewed 20 books on March 8th (no exaggeration), ranging from "RFID Essentials" (whatever that means), "Web site Cookbook", "Open GL", to "Degunking Your Home". Suspiciously, almost all of these reviews got 5 stars, where the pros stated are almost identical to those stated by the publisher, and the cons are really funny ones, such as "I would have liked full color throughout".
W Boudville: Reviewed 15 books on March 15th, including "Nanoelectronics and Nanosystems : From Transistors to Molecular and Quantum Devices", "The Origins of Cauchy’s Rigorous Calculus (Dover Books on Mathematics)", "The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors", "Natural Resources and Violent Conflict: Options and Actions", and of course "Computational Geometry in C (Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science)". This guy usually gives all his books 4 starts. I think he’s playing it safer than Herrington.
John Matlock: This guy reviewed 11 books on March 15th. Apparently, he read the "Handbook of Parallel Computing and Statistics", "Practical Poser 6", "The Rock from Mars : A Detective Story on Two Planets", "Carrara 5 Pro Handbook", "Beginning Visual C# 2005", "The Glorious Cause : The American Revolution, 1763-1789", and of course a book about marketing, seeing how marketing relates to the American revolution, C#, Carrara, Astronomy, Posing, and Statistics. Matlock opts for the 5 stars on all his reviews.
Now about this book, I’m buying it, because I read some excerpts in the library and I think it’s great, not because of the rating of these guys. My 5 stars are given for the book, and the people who wrote the book, but certainly not for the publisher. Now I’m not against anyone making a quick buck, but I’m certainly against people getting paid for misleading others. I think Amazon has a real challenge over here:
1. Review their rating system, raising an alarm when someone has a way above normal number of reviews/day.
2. Dealing with unethical publishers encouraging and paying for this trash, and I think this is the hardest challenge for Amazon.
I just hope that Amazon is not aware of this, which I really find it hard to believe.

Truth about Paid Reviews
Look behind the high star ratings, particularly those which come out right after a book prints. Ie: If the reviewer writes several reviews a day, and they are all high ratings, and you believe it, then you have just been scammed. Matlock writes up to 12 review a day, on all different kinds of books. 5 stars each. He actually reads 12 books including computer programming books in one 24 hour day plus has time to write and send 12 reviews? What ever happened to honesty? How much do these guy get paid for this garbage? This book may be outstanding, but you can not trust Matlock, Boudville, or Herrington to tell you that. Too bad, because my quick scan made me think it is a fairly good advanced PHP book.

I have purchased too many computer books based on these biased reviews, and feel like I have been cheated. This is a lousy way to treat your customers. Maybe CBS or NBC or Fox will expose this on national TV. One star for lack of honesty in paying for or participating in this scam.

Best book I’ve found on php5
I got this book after reading a rather poor intro on php 5 (Learning php5) and was rather pleased with the book.

I had no experience with php (well other than reading the other book) and found this book very accessible. The book gives you enough information to get started on php5 and the majority of its features. It even has information about writing your own php extensions. Although I really didn’t find the all the Pear info that helpful.

I do really wish the book had more information on design patterns etc for php 5. It did go over a few but not ones that are particularly useful for building applications for the web. But I guess this is sort of the status of PHP, its still seems to be a sort of hacky scripting language.

Good, but not Great
I really enjoyed reading this book, and I did learn a good deal of things in the process. However this book covers a lot of topics, and because of that it doesn’t get too in depth about any one subject. It mostly skims over many of the new OOP features of PHP5, and PEAR. Think of this book as a good resource for further web research.

Highly Recommended
PHP 5 Power Programming is the ideal introduction to PHP 5 for those who are already familiar with the PHP language. This book, written by some of the best known in the world of PHP, brings together all of the new and powerful features that PHP 5 has to offer, from polymorphism and interfaces to SQLite and SOAP. Anyone who knows PHP 4 and are wanting to make the change to PHP 5 would benefit from the "Making the Move" chapter. Watch out beginners, while the book does offer a "Basic Language" chapter, it isn’t designed to introduce new programmers to the language. Those who are familiar with similar programming languages may be able to learn PHP from this short chapter, however don’t expect the rest of the book to stop and wait for you.

PHP 5 Power Programming succeeds in showing the new features of PHP. The principle addition to PHP is the improvement of OOP. This book dedicated two chapters to introduce PHP 5’s Object Orientated language and makes a fine job of simplifying something which appears complicated even to an experienced programmer. If you ever wanted someone to make sense of what PHP 5’s OOP can accomplish, this book delivers it without fail. One of my personal favourites about this book is Chapter 5. Unlike the myriads of other PHP books, Chapter 5 actually deals with real life situations, such as file uploads and basic (but important!) file architecture. This chapter deals with the problems faced with cookies and sessions, and provides an excellent way around them. By the time you reach Chapter 6, you could be wondering what’s left to be learned. The answer? Lots. So sit back and enjoy the journey through PHP 5, your in the hands of very experienced authors.

Not only does this book provide you with the "definitive introduction to PHP 5’s advanced features" it also includes an extended 90-day trial of Zend Studio - the ideal Development Environment for PHP. This may make it a tempting purchase for programmers who are new to PHP. Even if the back cover encourages new developers to buy this book, I would strongly recommend against doing so. Chapter 2 does help set down the basics, but be prepared to take the plunge as Chapter 3 goes straight into OOP. If you’re new to PHP and sure about choosing this book, I would suggest skipping both Chapters 3 and 4, head into Chapter 5 and see how the language should be used to the best of its ability.

PHP 5 Power Programming by Andi Gutmans (co-creator, PHP 5), Stig Saether Bakken (PHP core team member, creator of PEAR) and Derick Rethans (PHP contributor and the PHP QA team leader) is the perfect purchase for PHP developers wishing to bring their skills and programs into a new level. This book wastes no time in getting stuck into the advanced new features of PHP 5 and soon you’ll be putting a big of reflection into all of your code. While not ideal for beginners, anyone who has experience with languages such as C, Perl or Java will find themselves understanding PHP in no time.

Great Upgrade Book
If you’re already writing PHP and want to hone your skills, this is the book for which you’ve been searching. Bring a highlighter because you will want to go back for quick references since the book is packed with so much good information.

If you don’t write code and think OOP is a sound you make when you drop something, you will never have to buy another book as it will take you a lifetime to finish this one.

Superb Advanced Topic Coverage
This book is one of those rarities in computer-book industry that are actually worth reading and a place in your bookshelf. The authors do an excellent job at uncovering what lies beneath the hood, so to speak. The first few chapters are a great refresher for those of us who come from a different programming language background. The intorduction to OO programming and patterns is one of the best I’ve read coming from a non-academic source. Thereafter is when the real substance surfaces. Showing how to take full advantage of not only PHP5’s OO, but also of the C-based Zend engine and PEAR modules. The chapters on database connectivity are absolutely outstanding. The book is well written, and in some parts goes down to the time and space complexity and also the data structures used by the engine. Very good book overall. The only reason I did not give five stars to this excellent primer is because I found at least five or six typographical errors in the first few chapters. Not a big deal, just a matter of personal preference.
A must for PHP power developers.

Power Programming is not for beginners.
The title says it all for power programmers if you are new to the php world and web applications in general getting into this book may be tough. Ok, they have a whole chapter devoted for the basics but its not a tutorial for you to learn how to do php the main focus of this book is the new object oreintation in php5 and it goes indepth with pear it allows you to really take your website application scheme and shows you what you can do with the php5 it now has a database built in with it but again for those of you who may want to read this book to learn the basics it may not be for you it requires that you have a fairly wide knowledge base of programming in general php is basically the best of all kinds of programming languages as the authors put it. There are some good examples for web applications but I think that they could probably have a site with the tutorials or a cd with php5 on it compiled differently for those different types of unix. Coming from the people who had for the most part created php it s a solid book could have gone through some more proof reads as I saw some mistakes which is just the critically anal side of me showing but I think it would be a good book to read if you have dealt with the php world before and are wanting more about the newest verion then go for it but if are just wanting to learn try something else

In-Depth PHP 5 Knowledge for the Already Initiated
OK, so you’ve created your first web page with PHP and MySQL and it’s all right--it does what you want--but you want something more. Something in there is lacking. You’ve been searching for the best way to get your object-oriented applications working properly, or you need to find a better way to assimilate your data graphically for your boss and the only computer technology he understands is the World Wide Web. Welcome to the world of power programming with the latest version of PHP.

One of the latest books in the Prentice Hall’s Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series is this one called "PHP 5 Power Programming." Written by Andi Gutmans, the lead PHP 5 designer, Stig Saether Bakken, the creator of PEAR, and Derick Rethans, a key PHP contributor, this book is a self-proclaimed tome of wonders which contains insights into all the key features of the latest version of PHP and the keys to unlocking all its wholesome goodness.

After spending a little time showing the evolution of PHP, the authors dive right in. They only devote a brief introduction to the basics of PHP. Clearly, if all you’ve done is convert a six-line BASH script into PHP, you might check out a less involved reference first. You’re expected to be tired with the PHP basics already when you dive into this work, because it’s barely a chapter gone before you start getting involved in advanced constructs like iterators, object polymorphism, overloading and exception handling. The best part is the authors never leave you floundering about a simple topic just because they’re in the midst of a complicated one. They never let you forget how to unset a cookie, while explaining all of the safeguards necessary to maintain a safe operating environment for a published Web application.

Some of the topics that can be found in this very involved book are: stucturing and designing Web applications, integration with MySQL for data storage and recovery, working with the GD libraries for extensive graphical manipulation, and a detailed discussion and reference on PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository, which does for PHP what CPAN does for Perl. There are also sections with great insite into using PHP with XML and SOAP, regular expressions and streams. And there’s even a detailed chapter towards the back about benchmarking your PHP performance and enhancing its operation. Three appendices provide information on the packages available through PEAR and PECL, the phpDocumentor application and Zend Studio.

For a technical manual, this book is surprisingly well laid out. You can use the index in the back to find the topic of your interest, but just skimming through reveals that everything is put where you can find it. Reading the book cover to cover works well also. I doubt the average reader will skip over much as this reference is chock full of good information and written with a style that keeps the reader interested, even if it’s a topic he might already be familiar with.

For anyone who already has the fundamentals of PHP in pocket, but wants to get into the nuts and bolts of the new version and explore all of the depth and richness of some of its advanced features, this book is definitely a keeper. At 689 pages, it’s long enough to contain a treasure trove of information, but short enough not to turn anyone away by its sheer volume. The best part is, all of this information is straight from the guys who know it best, so you can be sure that all of the best tips are included. And by the end of the book it’s clear that PHP has evolved a great deal more robustness than it’s original title and function of hypertext preprocessor had likely ever imagined.