With the release of PHP 5 web developers need a guide to developing with PHP 5 to both learn its complex new features and more fully implement the long-standing features on which PHP’s success is built. PHP 5 in Practice is a reference guide that provides developers with easy-to-use and easily extensible code to solve common PHP problems. It focuses on providing real code solutions to problems, allowing the reader to learn by seeing exactly what is happening behind the scenes to get your solution. Because a real-life situation will rarely match the book’s example problems precisely, PHP 5 in Practice explains the solution well enough that you will understand it and can learn how to truly solve your own problem.
PHP 5 in Practice is a ‘cookbook’ or ‘problem and solution’ style book. In fact, it is the spiritual successor to the PHP Developer’s Cookbook, also by Sam’s Publishing.
When writing this book, we attempted to avoid the common pitfall in these ‘cookbook’ type technical references can take, where so many of the examples/solutions are so simplistic, to be concepts explained/answered by a single function call.
Therefore instead, we focused on presenting real world problems, with in some cases a rather beefy solution presented. The more ‘simple’ problems/solutions still exist, but only in the form of a ‘quick hits’ section at the beginning of each chapter. This is to present a number of PHP functions that by themselves can solve many of your problems, without spending whole paragraphs on them.
In the end, while you can read this book cover-to-cover, we hope it serves as a great reference manual, sitting beside you while you work. Available for you to pick up and reference a solution that you’d scanned earlier. Or for just parts that interest you, in order to spark your imagination into directions that will solve your own problems.
– Eli White (Elliott White III)
