About the Author

Lee Babin is a programmer based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where he serves as the Chief Programmer for an innovative development firm duly named The Code Shoppe. He has been developing complex web driven applications since his graduation from DeVry University in early 2002 and has since worked on over 50 custom websites and online applications. Lee is married to a beautiful woman by the name of Dianne, who supports him in his rather full yet rewarding work schedule. He enjoys video games, working out, martial arts, and traveling, and can usually be found working online on one of his many fun web projects at any given time.While Lee has experience in a multitude of web programming languages, his preference has always been PHP. With the release of PHP 5, many of his wishes have been fulfilled. Nathan A. Good lives in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota. He is a contractor with Alliance of Computer Professionals in Bloomington. When he isn't writing software, Nathan enjoys building PCs and servers, reading about and working with new technologies, and trying to get all his friends to make the move to open source software. When he's not at a computer (which he admits is not often), he spends time with his family, at his church, and at the movies. Frank M. Kromann is the Senior Software Engineer at intelleFLEET, where he is responsible for software design and development as well as hardware integration. Most of his work involves developing database driven web applications, and involves a combination of centralized Linux servers and decentralized Linux and Windows XP systems (touch screen computers) for data acquisition.

Frank has been involved with PHP development since 1997, has developed several extensions to the project, and has contributed to development of the Windows version of PHP-GTK. When he is not writing code, he is on a golf course in Southern California or having fun with his family.

Jon Stephens is a programmer and database analyst based out of Australia. He has written about MySQL, PHP, and other topics, and he has co-authored Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization: From Novice to Professional and PHP 5 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach. Stephens recently joined MySQL AB as a member of the Documentation Team.

Book Description

PHP 5 Recipes is a perfect reference manual for PHP. Absolutely everything is covered. You can either... look up information on a certain action, or use the very detailed index to search on a specific function.

— Joe Topjian, Adminspotting

What you hold in your hands is the answer to all your PHP 5 needs. We have written PHP 5 Recipes with a number of purposes in mind.

First, this book is a source of instant solutions, including countless pieces of useful code that you can just copy and paste into your own applications, giving you answers fast and saving you hours of coding time.

Second, this book is a useful reference to the most important aspects of the PHP 5 language, including the vital functions you know and love from previous versions of PHP, as well as the functions introduced in PHP 5.

Finally, this book explains the new PHP 5 functionality in detail, including the vastly improved object-oriented capabilities and the new MySQLi database extension.

We are confident PHP 5 Recipes will be a useful and welcome companion throughout your PHP journey, keeping you on the cutting edge of PHP development, ahead of the competition, and giving you all the answers you need, when you need them.