Chapter Summary

Every chapter aims to cover a set of common problems that developers face every day.

Chapter 1, "Manipulating Strings," is about working with strings. It covers such subjects as processing a string one character at a time and converting strings to different character sets.

Chapter 2, "Working with Numbers, Dates & Times," is all about numbers. It covers concepts such as working with arbitrary-precision numbers, generating biased random numbers , and PHP's built-in functions for manipulating and getting dates and times.

Chapter 3, "Using Arrays," covers topics ranging from merging two arrays to methods for naturally sorting arrays.

Chapter 4, "PHP's Built-in Arrays and Constants," explains items such as the __FILE__ constant and the $HTTP_POST_VARS array.

Chapter 5, "Matching Data with Regular Expressions," is all about matching, validating, and parsing data. We explore everything from matching an email address to using Perl-compatible regular expressions in PHP. This chapter also contains a lengthy introduction to basic regular expression syntax.

Chapter 6, "Handling Files," covers subjects from opening files and locking files to creating temporary files to manipulating the contents of a file.

Chapter 7, "Working with Files in Directories," is about directory access. We explain how to remove an entire directory tree and search singular directory trees. We end the chapter with a complete search engine and indexer.

Chapter 8, "Functions," discusses problems such as establishing the default value for a function and dynamically declaring functions based on user input.

Chapter 9, "Classes," examines PHP's object-oriented features, including concepts such as declaring a class and declaring a destructor with PHP.

Chapter 10, "Maintaining Sessions with PHP," covers the aspects of maintaining state with PHP 4's session management features and WDDX. It also features a small shopping cart system.

Chapter 11, "Interacting with Web Pages and Servers," is all about automating Web tasks . Sample recipes include automatically submitting a Web form and dynamically generating JavaScript.

Chapter 12, "Creating a Database-Independent API with PHP," discusses the process of creating a PHP 3 “compatible, database-independent API for use in your programs.

Chapter 13, "Interfacing with Other Programs and Languages," discusses the basics such as using exec () and system() and then gets into more advanced features such as manipulating COM, .NET, and Java objects.

Chapter 14, "Communicating with Sockets," examines topics ranging from opening and using SSL connections to creating servers with PHP by using the Sockets extension.

Chapter 15, "Handling E-mail," examines the aspects of working with email in PHP. We cover the basics such as sending a plain text e-mail and then move on to more advanced areas of sending email, such as sending HTML email and sending email with attachments. We also cover the process of manipulating IMAP email boxes.

Chapter 16, "Working with SNMP Objects," and Chapter 17, "LDAP," cover the LDAP and SNMP protocols. We resolve all the common problems related to the LDAP and SNMP extensions.

Chapter 18, "Creating and Managing Images," discusses the process of creating and manipulating images with PHP and the GD library.

Chapter 19, "HTML," shows how to use PHP to work with HTML.

Chapter 20, "XML," looks at both the Expat and DOM XML libraries, and discusses all the common issues with parsing XML.

Chapter 21, "Zend API," covers topics ranging from the basics such as fetching parameters to advanced concepts such as adding methods to preexisting objects.