PHP Cookbook - by David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg
Read online:
http://safari.oreilly.com/0596101015/phpckbk-PREFACE-2
What Is in This Book
We don't expect that you'll sit down and read this book from cover to cover (although we'll be happy if you do!). PHP programmers are constantly faced with a wide variety of challenges on a wide range of subjects. Turn to the PHP Cookbook when you encounter a problem you need to solve. Each recipe is a self-contained explanation that gives you a head start toward finishing your task. When a recipe refers to topics outside its scope, it contains pointers to related recipes and other online and offline resources.
If you choose to read an entire chapter at once, that's okay. The recipes generally flow from easy to hard, with example programs that "put it all together" at the end of many chapters. The chapter introduction provides an overview of the material covered in the chapter, including relevant background material, and points out a few highlighted recipes of special interest.
The book begins with four chapters about basic data types. Chapter 1 covers details like processing substrings, manipulating case, taking strings apart into smaller pieces, and parsing comma-separated data. Chapter 2 explains operations with floating-point numbers, random numbers, converting between bases, and number formatting. Chapter 3 shows you how to manipulate dates and times, format them, handle time zones and daylight saving time, and find time to microsecond precision. Chapter 4 covers array operations like iterating, merging, reversing, sorting, and extracting particular elements.
Next are three chapters that discuss program building blocks. Chpater 5 covers notable features of PHP's variable handling, such as default values, static variables, and producing string representations of complex data types. The recipes in Chpater 6 deal with using functions in PHP: processing arguments, passing and returning variables by reference, creating functions at runtime, and scoping variables. Chapter 7 covers PHP's object-oriented capabilities, with recipes on OOP basics as well as PHP 5's new features, such as magic methods, destructors, access control, and reflection.
After the data types and building blocks come six chapters devoted to topics that are central to web programming. Chapter 8 covers cookies, headers, authentication, working with query strings, and other fundamentals of web applications. Chapter 9 covers processing and validating form input, displaying multipage forms, showing forms with error messages, and guarding against problems such as cross-site scripting and multiple submission of the same form. Chapter 10 explains the differences between DBM and SQL databases and, using PHP 5's PDO database access abstraction layer, shows how to connect to a database, assign unique ID values, retrieve rows, change data, escape quotes, and log debugging information. Chapter 11 covers PHP's built-in sessions module, which lets you maintain information about a user as he moves from page to page on your web site. This chapter also highlights some of the security issues associated with sessions. Chapter 12 discusses all things XML: PHP 5's SimpleXML extension and revamped DOM functions, using XPath and XSLT, and reading and writing both RSS and Atom feeds. Chapter 13 explores topics useful to PHP applications that integrate with external web sites and client-side JavaScript such as retrieving remote URLs, cleaning up HTML, and responding to an Ajax request.
The next three chapters are all about network interaction. Chapter 14 details the ins and outs of consuming a web service'using an external REST, SOAP, or XML-RPC service from within your code. Chapter 15 handles the other side of the web services equation'serving up REST, SOAP, or XML-RPC requests to others. Both chapters discuss WSDL, authentication, headers, and error handling. Chapter 16 discusses other network services such as sending email messages, using LDAP, and doing DNS lookups.
The next section of the book is a series of chapters on features and extensions of PHP that help you build applications that are robust, secure, user-friendly, and efficient. Chpater 17 shows you how to create graphics, with recipes on drawing text, lines, polygons, and curves. Chapter 18 focuses on security topics such as avoiding session fixation and cross-site scripting, working with passwords, and encrypting data. Chapter 19 helps you make your applications globally friendly and includes recipes localizing text, dates and times, currency values, and images, as well as working with text in different character encodings, including UTF-8. Chapter 20 goes into detail on error handling, debugging techniques, and writing tests for your code. Chapter 21 explains how to compare the performance of two functions and provides tips on getting your programs to run at maximum speed. Chapter 22 covers regular expressions, including capturing text inside of HTML tags, calling a PHP function from inside a regular expression, and using greedy and nongreedy matching.
Chapters 23 and 24 cover the filesystem. Chapter 23 focuses on files: opening and closing them, using temporary files, locking file, sending compressed files, and processing the contents of files. Chapter 24 deals with directories and file metadata, with recipes on changing file permissions and ownership, moving or deleting a file, and processing all files in a directory.
Last, there are two chapters on topics that extend the reach of what PHP can do. Chapter 25 covers using PHP outside of web programming. Its recipes cover command-line topics such as parsing program arguments and reading passwords. Chapter 26 covers PEAR (the PHP Extension and Application Repository) and PECL (the PHP Extension Community Library). PEAR is a collection of PHP code that provides functions and extensions to PHP. PECL is a similar collection, but of extensions to PHP written in C. We use PEAR and PECL modules throughout the book and Chapter 26 shows you how to install and upgrade them.
