Chapter 8. Web Application Development

Now that you have a little PHP and MySQL interaction under your belt, it's time to take things up a notch. This chapter is similar to Chapter 3, "Creating Dynamic Web Sites," in that it covers a myriad of somewhat independent topics. Naturally, most of the examples in this chapter will involve MySQL, as you continue to develop those skills.

Some of the scripts broaden the application started in the preceding chapter by adding new, popular features. First of all, you'll learn methods of making your applications more flexible by adjusting their behavior to correspond to certain server settings. Also, you'll see several tricks for managing database information, in particular editing and deleting records. At that same time a couple new ways of passing data to your PHP pages will be introduced. Next, three new features will be added to the view_users.php script from the preceding chapter. This chapter concludes with a tangential topic: You'll discover what HTTP headers are, why they're important, and how to control them with PHP.

As you can see, this chapter presents a long list of valuable information. The common denominator here is that these features are all present in more sophisticated Web applications and their proper usage distinguishes the more seasoned programmer from the beginner.