Foreword

I l @ ve RuBoard

In my life, I have known a lot of programming languages. Some have been great friendships all my life, such as C, and others, such as Prolog, were mere student flirtations.

I first met PHP in 1999 when I was still working with Active Server Pages, and I was immediately struck by its simplicity and elegance . PHP seems to combine some of the best features of JavaScript and Perl while avoiding many of their faults. In PHP, strings are just another data type (unlike JavaScript, where they are objects), and PHP uses a clean C-like syntax that is easy to read (thereby avoiding Perl's eccentricities).

As a Windows programmer, I was delighted by the large library of user - contributed extensions available for PHP. What would have required the purchase of commercial libraries in ASP was available for free in PHP, and with source code to boot. I felt that Windows programmers could gain a lot by using PHP, so in August 2000 I started one of the first web sites to cover cross-platform PHP scripting and using PHP on Windows ” http://php.weblogs.com.

While using PHP, I started to port some of my ASP code to PHP. Since I programmed primarily in JScript, it was mostly a matter of putting $ signs in front of all the variables . However, I began to miss one of my favorite tools in Windows ”ADO, Microsoft's set of objects for manipulating databases. So I developed the PHP database wrapper library called ADOdb, which provides functionality similar to that of ADO for PHP and runs on both Windows and UNIX. To my pleasant surprise, it seems that many PHP programmers are also Windows programmers, and thousands of people have downloaded and are using this open -source library.

I am very pleased to see that, in the same spirit of promoting cross-platform PHP, Andrew Stopford has spent a lot of time and effort coming up with this book on PHP for Windows. He even covers how PHP can work with the latest Microsoft technologies such as .NET, which is complementary to PHP because it is language-neutral. I hope this book proves useful, both in your home and as a reference at work.

”John Lim

I l @ ve RuBoard