What's in This Book
This book is divided into 10 chapters and 3 appendixes. The material in the first half of this book covers vital components of everyday web programming: object-oriented programming, MySQL, SQLite, and XML. It's hard to use PHP 5 without them. Specifically:
Chapter 1, Introductionexplains the background of PHP 5 and its new extensions.
Chapter 2, Object-Oriented Programming, covers object-oriented programming under PHP 5.
Chapter 3, MySQL, examines MySQLi, a new MySQL database extension. It also details SQL features of MySQL 4.0 and 4.1.
Chapter 4, SQLite, talks about SQLite, an embedded database library.
Chapter 5, XML, teaches everything XML: DOM, XSLT, SimpleXML, SAX, and XPath.
The second half of the book discusses more specialized PHP 5 features. Iterators, exceptions, streams, SOAP, and other extensions are all extremely useful for solving specific tasks. The more you program in PHP 5, the more you'll find yourself integrating these features into your code.
Chapter 6, Iterators and SPL, shows how iterators and SPL let you loop through directories, database queries, and XML documents.
Chapter 7, Error Handling and Debugging, helps you handle errors with exception handling.
Chapter 8, Streams, Wrappers, and Filters, introduces streams, wrappers, and filters.
Chapter 9, Other Extensions, discusses the SOAP and Tidy extensions and the Reflection classes.
Chapter 10, PHP 5 in Action, puts the whole book together with a sample PHP 5 application.
The three appendixes complement the rest of the book:
Appendix A, Introduction to XML, provides an introduction to XML and Namespaces.
Appendix B, Additional New Features and Minor Changes, documents the changes in PHP 5 not covered elsewhere in the book.
Appendix C, Installing PHP 5 Alongside PHP 4, details how to integrate PHP 5 into your existing web server and PHP 4 setup.
