What s Unusual About This Book?

What's Unusual About This Book?

This booklike other books in the Spring Into… Seriesincludes the following elements:

• Each topic is explained in a discrete one- or two-page unit called a "chunk."

• Each chunk builds on the previous chunks in that chapter.

• Most chunks contain one or more examples. I believe that good examples provide the foundation for almost all useful technical documents.

• Many chunks contain sidebars that provide helpful, ancillary material.

In addition, this book is filled with examplesdozens of thembecause seeing a working example is the best way to learn this material. Here are just a few included topics:

• Reading data from a web page's text fields, radio buttons, check boxes, and list boxes on the server

• Creating and handling image maps

• Tracking users with sessions and cookies

• Writing data to files on the server (such as guest books)

• Recovering from errors without crashing

• Connecting to databases on the server

• Using SQL to work with databases

• Drawing images on-the-fly and sending them back to the browser

• Handling strings and arrays

• Working with the PHP operators

• Creating functions

• Creating classes and objects

• Using FTP from PHP

• Sending email from PHP

• Using sessions to preserve data between page accesses

• The complete PHP syntax

There's a lot to PHP, and there's a lot to this book. Our plan is to cram as much PHP into the book as we can.