Adam Trachtenberg Books

When it comes to creating dynamic web sites, the open source PHP language is red-hot property: used on more than 20 million web sites today, PHP is now more popular than Microsoft's ASP.NET technology. With our Cookbook's unique format, you can learn how to build dynamic web applications that work on any web browser. This revised new edition makes it easy to find specific solutions for programming challenges.PHP Cookbook has a wealth of solutions for problems that you'll face regularly. With topics that range from beginner questions to advanced web programming techniques, this guide contains practical examples -- or "recipes" -- for anyone who uses this scripting language to generate dynamic web content. Updated for PHP 5, this book provides solutions that explain how to use the new language features in detail, including the vastly improved object-oriented capabilities and the new PDO data access extension. New sections on classes and objects are included, along with new material on processing XML, building web services with PHP, and working with SOAP/REST architectures. With each recipe, the authors include a discussion that explains the logic and concepts underlying the solution.

If you're using PHP 4, an upgrade to PHP 5 is likely on the horizon, especially with its exciting new features. While a comprehensive reference guide is useful, experienced PHP programmers need a focused resource that addresses their immediate questions: what's new, what's different, and how to leverage these changes effectively. This guide is specifically tailored for PHP developers familiar with PHP 4, concentrating on PHP 5's new features rather than covering the entire language. It provides a concise comparison of PHP 4 and PHP 5, detailing improvements and showcasing side-by-side code examples to illustrate how the new features simplify common PHP challenges. Each feature is presented with code snippets, clarifying its purpose, optimal usage, and advantages over PHP 4. Key topics include robust object-oriented programming enhancements, an improved MySQL extension supporting prepared statements, a complete overhaul of XML support, simplified web services with SOAP, the SQLite embedded database, and cleaner error handling through exceptions. Written by Adam Trachtenberg, coauthor of the PHP Cookbook, this guide allows you to dive straight into PHP 5's innovations, ensuring you grasp both the practical and theoretical aspects by the end.