This book is an essential guide to some of the best free add-ons to PHP. These add-ons, or tools, provide invaluable functionality for improving your PHP Web applications, including accessing databases, generating robust Web forms, using page templating systems, creating and parsing XML documents, authenticating users, and much more.

In response to the existing shortage of documentation about the tools, Sklar packs this book with details about installing, configuring, and using each toolalong with plenty of examples tailored to PHP 4 and 5.

Sklar also lays out the details of Auth and HTML_QuickFormtwo hard working PEAR modulesso you dont have to code your own authentication system or Web form construction set! Also included are chapters on debugging programs, and increasing Web server speed. In short, you will learn to eliminate inefficiencies in PHP, and enhance performance without any code modification.

PHP Toolbox explains how to use popular PEAR modules and PHP add-ons to simplify your XML processing, database access, templating, and other common tasks. It also explains how to use a PHP code cache or optimizer, which speeds up your code without requiring any rewriting or code changes.

PHP Toolbox explains how to use popular PEAR modules and PHP add-ons to simplify your XML processing, database access, templating, and other common tasks.

This book is an essential guide to some of the best free add-ons to PHP. These add-ons, or tools, provide invaluable functionality for improving your PHP Web applications, including accessing databases, generating robust Web forms, using page templating systems, creating and parsing XML documents, authenticating users, and much more.

In response to the existing shortage of documentation about the tools, Sklar packs this book with details about installing, configuring, and using each tool—along with plenty of examples tailored to PHP 4 and 5.

Sklar also lays out the details of Auth and HTML_QuickForm—two hard working PEAR modules—so you don’t have to code your own authentication system or Web form construction set! Also included are chapters on debugging programs, and increasing Web server speed. In short, you will learn to eliminate inefficiencies in PHP, and enhance performance without any code modification.

In this book, David Sklar explains how to use popular PEAR modules and PHP add-ons to simplify your XML processing, database access, templating, and other common tasks. He also explains how to use a PHP code cache or optimizer, which speeds up your code without requiring any rewriting or code changes.

Today, PHP is the leading programming language for developing dynamic web applications. The simplicity of PHP, the ease of development, a large community, and the expansive repository of open source PHP libraries, make it a favorite of web designers and developers. In Essential PHP Tools: Modules, Extensions, and Accelerators,, you’ll find many useful and popular packages for PHP. Sklar provides lots of examples of how to use little- or poorly-documented PHP packages.

Extensions? What extensions?
You would think that a PHP book that actually mentioned "Extensions" as part of the title would cover extensions wouldn’t you? Well in the case of this book you would be wrong. The index has exactly 1 entry for ’extensions’ and even that is a 1 sentence footnote! Compare that to the 45 pages devoted to the subject in George Schlossnagle’s book "Advanced PHP Programming" and you can get an idea of actually how deficient this book is in this aspect.

Not for beginners
This is really only for advanced PHP programmers. If you are one, it maybe will render in 5 star.

Good, but not great
I bought this book with high expectations.

It is a very good book, well written, and David Sklar really has done a good job writing it. However, I didn’t find it that useful. It wasn’t even remotely close to comprehensive about what it covered, and made only footnote mention of other tools that are out there.

I ended up returning it -- something I rarely do. I didn’t think it was worth the money. Most of this info is available for free online anyways.

Good, but not great
I bought this book with high expectations.



It is a very good book, well written, and David Sklar really has done a good job writing it. However, I didn’t find it that useful. It wasn’t even remotely close to comprehensive about what it covered, and made only footnote mention of other tools that are out there.



I ended up returning it -- something I rarely do. I didn’t think it was worth the money. Most of this info is available for free online anyways.

Helpful but not comprehensive
This book does alert you to many useful modues, extensions and accelerators and given that many of these are open source and their documentation can be skimpy, it’s good to have examples and documentation from another source.

However, this book is not comprehensive in it’s coverage of said modules, extensions and accelerators and in areas where it covers material already explained in the documentation, I preferred the original documentation’s style and explanations. The book does mention things that the original documention does not, but the original documentation talks about things that the book does not.

In short, I had to read both the documentation and the book to fully understand the code.

Good book for add-on tools
I have found HTML & Smarty chapter very useful. You will also find other chapter useful if you have to work on them in real life projects. Overall very practical book.

I hope to see more books like this
The PHP world is full of great add-ons, modules and tools available for free on the Internet. Unfortunately, many of them lack quality documentation. If you already have a decent understanding of PHP and want to expand your arsenal this book is for you. Take a look at the TOC and you will find plenty of useful material, from portable database connectivity, to SOAP, XML and much more. Each chapter is self-containing, no linear reading is required and you can safely skip something or jump across different topics. I hope to see more books like this; there are many little software gems out there that deserve this kind of treatment

Learn to use external PHP libraries effectively
David Sklar has written a book on a subject that most other PHP authors have ignored, and which many PHP programmers have failed to consider: how using pre-made, existing libraries effectively can save you hours of writing (and re-writing) PHP code.

There are many external libraries available to PHP, some under the PEAR brand ( http://pear.php.net ) and others by individual authors or companies.

If you would like to automate the creation, processing and validatin of form processing, there’s HTML_QuickForm. If you’d like to implement a templating system to separate presentation logic from other programming logic, there’s Smarty. If you would like to setup a lightweight, yet completely usable and effective web services platform, there’s the PEAR XML-RPC library.

In many of these cases, the online documentation is too complicated or technical (e.g. HTML_QuickForm) or too skimpy (PEAR XML-RPC). Enter David Sklar’s book!

David uses concise, clear language with plenty of examples to explain how a certain library works. He goes through it step-by-step, first with a paragraph of descriptive text, then with a snippet of code elucidating what was previously mentioned.

He manages to cover just enough ground to enable you to grasp how to use a certain library without boring you to tears with extraneous, non-essential information.

If you would like to avoid re-inventing the wheel and the introduction of bugs (that almost always follows the insertion of new, untested code), I suggest you procure a copy of Essential PHP Tools today, and read it cover-to-cover!