Preface

Welcome to PHP! This book has been written to be as comprehensiveand as accessibleas a book on PHP can be. It puts the power of PHP to work for you, pushing the envelope as far as it can go. The best way to learn any topic like PHP is by example, and this is an example-oriented book. You'll find dozens of tested examples here, ready to go to work.

PHP is quickly gaining popularity these days. Web page authors are requiring more and more power, and PHP is the answer. Not content to simply handle web pages in browsers any more, people are turning to the server side to do things you just can't do in a browser. Using PHP, you have total control over your web applicationsand the good part is that they're not any harder to write than a typical web page.

PHP is an amazing package, and you're getting into it at the right time, when the excitement level is soaring. You'll see more PHP here than in any similar book, doing things you won't see other places, such as drawing images on-the-fly on the server and then sending them back to the browser.