Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours, Second Edition

This is not a PHP programming book. This book will teach you about the very basics of PHP syntax and structure and while it will not get you anywhere near proficiency, it will give you a very solid, albeit simple, foundation from which to continue. With literally thousands of included functions and thousands more specialized functions available for all forms of tasks, PHP is a rich and subtle language not easily learned in a hurry. This book will provide the foundation to continue exploring the language in a very straight forward and understandable presentation. For example, the book covers arrays with 19 sections which gives a good knowledge base and allows the beginner to begin to use these incredibly useful entities but it doesn't come close to the available 77 array functions contained within the language. Or the 21 string functions covered in the book versus the 97 functions available in the language. Anybody interested in learning PHP will also want to bookmark [...] as the definitive source of information regarding the language. While knowledge of HTML/XHTML is not needed to learn PHP the typical usage of PHP will require a good understanding of markup languages and knowledge of HTTP will go a long way to making your life easier too. Because of PHP's versatility, the successful programmer will soon be learning SQL and XML to name only two. I encourage any beginning PHP programmer to buy this book for the basics. To glimpse PHP programming issues, I would refer you to 'PHP Solutions: Dynamic web design made easy' by David Powers from Friends of Ed as the next step in you education. PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy A quick, easy-to-understand introduction to creating dynamic Web sites with PHP.-- Quickly teaches the reader the basics of PHP, and how to make use of it in practical applications.-- PHP is similar to Microsoft's Active Server Pages, but is designed for the Apache Web server rather than IIS.-- This second edition is updated and revised to cover new developments in PHP and to further refine the book's organization and examples.Consisting of 24 one-hour lessons, Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours, 2nd Edition is divided into five sections that guide the reader through the language from the basics to the advanced functions. The first section of the book teaches the fundamentals of PHP. And then, building upon what has been taught in the first section, sections two through four shows the reader how to apply that knowledge in order to interact with the user by creating and managing forms, cookies and authentication. It also teaches how to access databases and how to integrate system components, e-mail, LDAP, network sockets and much more.