Chapter 1. Introduction
| PHP has grown from a set of tools for personal home page development to the world's most popular web programming language, and it now powers many of the Web's most frequented destinations. Along with such a transition comes new concerns, such as performance, maintainability, scalability, reliability, and (most importantly) security . Unlike language features such as conditional expressions and looping constructs, security is abstract. In fact, security is not a characteristic of a language as much as it is a characteristic of a developer. No language can prevent insecure code, although there are language features that can aid or hinder a security-conscious developer. This book focuses on PHP and shows you how to write secure code by leveraging PHP's unique features. The concepts in this book, however, are applicable to any web development platform. Web application security is a young and evolving discipline. This book teaches best practices that are theoretically sound, so that you can sleep at night instead of worrying about the new attacks and techniques that are constantly being developed by those with malicious intentions. However, it is wise to keep yourself informed of new advances in the field, and there are a few resources that can help:
This chapter provides the foundation for the rest of the book. It focuses on teaching you the principles and practices that are prerequisities for the lessons that follow. |
