Obtaining the Software

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The first step is to make sure that you have all the software you need. Here is your shopping list:

The most important item is, obviously, PHP itself. The PHP (version 4.1.0 or better) source code distribution is available from http://www.php.net/.
If you intend to run PHP as an Apache module (recommended), you'll also need the Apache web server. Apache (version 1.3.20 or better) source code is available from http://www.apache.org/.
In order to activate PHP's DOM and XSLT support, you also need a few external libraries:
- The zlib library (version 1.1.3 or better) is available from http://www.gzip.org/zlib/.
- The expat library (version 1.95.2 or better) is available from http:// sourceforge .net/projects/ expat /.
- The GNOME XML library, a.k.a. libxml (version 2.4.2 or better), is available from http://www.xmlsoft.org/.
- The Sablotron library (version 0.71 or better) is available from http://www.gingerall.com/.

Many of the examples in this book assume that you have a MySQL database server up and running on your system. In case you don't, you will want to download and install it. MySQL (version 3.23.23 or better) is available from http://www.mysql.com/.
Because you will be compiling all this software afresh, you also need a C++ compiler.Your development environment should already have one of these; however, in case it doesn't, you can try the GCC compiler. GCC is available at http://gcc.gnu.org/.
Finally, you need the tar and gunzip utilities to decompress and extract files from their distribution archives. Binaries for both can be downloaded from the GNU web site at http://www.gnu.org/.

In case you were wondering, all this software is freely available on the Internet, and can be downloaded at no charge.

Version Control

Here are the software versions used when developing this book:

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