PHP5 and MySQL Bible

Welcome to PHP5 and MySQL Bible!
Although we’re biased, we believe that the PHP Web-scripting language is the hands-down winner
in its niche—by far the easiest and most flexible server-side tool for getting great Web
sites up and running in a hurry. Although millions of Web programmers worldwide could be
wrong, in this particular case, they’re not. MySQL is the most popular open-source database
platform, and it is the first choice of many for creating database-backed PHP-driven Web sites
As we write this, PHP5 is in its third beta version, and PHP has continued to grow in reach,
adoption, and features since we wrote the first two versions of this book.

What Is PHP?
PHP is an open-source, server-side, HTML-embedded Web-scripting language that is compatible
with all the major Web servers (most notably Apache). PHP enables you to embed code
fragments in normal HTML pages—code that is interpreted as your pages are served up to
users. PHP also serves as a “glue” language, making it easy to connect your Web pages to
server-side databases.

Why PHP?
We devote nearly all of Chapter 1 to this question. The short answer is that it’s free, it’s open
source, it’s full featured, it’s cross-platform, it’s stable, it’s fast, it’s clearly designed, it’s easy
to learn, and it plays well with others.

What’s New in This Edition?
Although this book has a new title, it is in some sense a third edition. Previous versions were:
✦ PHP 4 Bible. Published in August 2000, covering PHP through version 4.0.
✦ PHP Bible, Second Edition. Published in September 2002, a significantly expanded version
of the first edition, current through PHP 4.2.
Our initial plan for this book was to simply reorganize the second edition and bring it up
to date with PHP5. We realized, however, that although the previous editions covered
PHP/MySQL interaction, we had left readers in the dark about how to create and administer
MySQL databases in the first place, and this led to many reader questions. As a result, we
decided to beef up the coverage of MySQL and change the title.