Specifications

Introduction
Welcome to PHP and MySQL Web Development. Within its pages, you will find distilled
knowledge from our experiences using PHP and MySQL, two of the hottest Web development
tools around.
In this introduction, we’ll cover
• Why you should read this book
• What you will be able to achieve using this book
• What PHP and MySQL are and why they’re great
• An overview of the new features of PHP 4
• How this book is organized
Let’s get started.
Why You Should Read This Book
This book will teach you how to create interactive Web sites from the simplest order form
through to complex secure e-commerce sites. What’s more, you’ll learn how to do it using Open
Source technologies.
This book is aimed at readers who already know at least the basics of HTML and have done
some programming in a modern programming language before, but have not necessarily pro-
grammed for the Internet or used a relational database. If you are a beginning programmer, you
should still find this book useful, but it might take you a little longer to digest. We’ve tried not
to leave out any basic concepts, but we do cover them at speed. The typical reader of this book
is someone who wants to master PHP and MySQL for the purpose of building a large or com-
mercial Web site. You might already be working in another Web development language; if so,
this book should get you up to speed quickly.
We wrote this book because we were tired of finding books on PHP that were basically a func-
tion reference. These books are useful, but they don’t help when your boss or client has said
“Go build me a shopping cart.” We have done our best to make every example useful. Many of
the code samples can be directly used in your Web site, and many others can be used with
minor modifications.
What You Will Be Able to Achieve Using This Book
Reading this book will enable you to build real-world, dynamic Web sites. If you’ve built Web
sites using plain HTML, you will realize the limitations of this approach. Static content from a
pure HTML Web site is just that—static. It stays the same unless you physically update it. Your
users can’t interact with the site in any meaningful fashion.
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