| 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.
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. |
