David Sklar is a Distinguished Engineer at Ning, part of Glam Media. Inaddition to PHP Cookbook, he is the author of Learning PHP 5 (O'Reilly), and Essential PHP Tools (Apress), and a scintillating blog:http://www.sklar.com/blog/. David lives in New York City and has adegree in Computer Science from Yale University.

Adam Trachtenberg is the Director of Platform and Services for eBay and is the author of two O'Reilly books, Upgrading to PHP 5 and PHP Cookbook.

Adam has an MBA from Columbia Business School. While there, he focused on general management and operations, with an emphasis on the field of technology. Adam also has a BA from Columbia University. As an undergraduate he majored in mathematics, and his other studies included computer science and Chinese.

Want to understand a certain PHP programming technique? Or learn how to accomplish a particular task? This cookbook is the first place to look. With more than 350 code-rich recipes revised for PHP 5.4 and 5.5, this third edition provides updated solutions for generating dynamic web content—everything from using basic data types to querying databases, and from calling RESTful APIs to testing and securing your site.

Each recipe includes code solutions that you can freely use, along with a discussion of how and why they work. Whether you’re an experienced PHP programmer or coming to PHP from another language, this book is an ideal on-the-job resource.

You’ll find recipes to help you with:

Basic data types: strings, numbers, arrays, and dates and times

Program building blocks: variables, functions, classes, and objects

Web programming: cookies, forms, sessions, and authentication

Database access using PDO, SQLite, and other extensions

RESTful API clients and servers, including HTTP, XML, and OAuth

Key concepts: email, regular expressions, and graphics creation

Designing robust applications: security and encryption, error handling, debugging and testing, and performance tuning

Files, directories, and PHP’s Command Line Interface

Libraries and package managers such as Composer and PECL