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Credits

Editorial Board
Dan Appleman
Craig Berry
Gary Cornell
Tony Davis
Steven Rycroft
Julian Skinner
Martin Streicher
Jim Sumser
Karen Watterson
Gavin Wray
John Zukowski

Additional Material
Dilip Thomas

Category Manager
Dilip Thomas

Technical Architect
Dilip Thomas

Technical Editors
Manjunath B. V.
Indu Britto
Matthew Moodie
Nilesh Parmar

Author Agent
Safiulla S. M.

Production Manager
Liz Toy

Production Coordinator
Pip Wonson

Illustrations
Tom Bartlett

Technical Reviewers
Thies C. Arntzen
Daniel Beulshausen
Cornelia Boenigk
Florian Clever
Ken Egervari
Jo Henrik Endrerud
Steph Fox
Zak Greant
Ryan Grove
Christopher Harshman
Joshua Hoover
Amit Kulkarni
Adam Lang
Richard Lynch
Mark Mamone
Tony Mobily
Jon Parise
Ganesh Prasad
George Ricter
Jon Rosenberg
Jonathan Sharp
Christopher Smith
Jerry Stratton
Carl Svensson
Ulf Wendel
Kevin Yank
Zili Zhang

Index
Adrian Axinte

Cover
Kurt Krames

Proof Reader
Fiona Berryman

Editorial Thanks
John Franklin
Victoria Hudgson
Dan Maharry

About the Authors

Luis Argerich

Luis is a development and technology manager for Salutia, a leading health solutions provider for South America and a teacher at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Luis has shown interest in PHP since version 2.0 and has used it in conjunction with XML for projects such as search engines, transactional systems, web applications, web services, and others.

Note

I would like to thank my company, my family, and my wife Natalia for the time spent with this book.

Wankyu Choi

Wankyu (pronounced wan-kyu, not wank-yu:-) is the president/CEO of NeoQuest Communications, Inc. running a PHP-powered English language education portal (http://www.neoqst.com/) in the Republic of Korea. He's been programming for more than a decade in a number of languages, the latest of which is PHP. He is independently working on an open source PHP project called NeoBoard (http://www.neoboard.net/), a feature-rich web discussion board. When not programming or writing, he can be found absorbed in reading the latest computer books or banging his head to Metallica or Megadeth, two of his favorite rock bands.

Note

I'd like to thank my parents for their encouragement and guidance, the dedicated staff at Wrox and the technical reviewers for all their hard work, the staff at NeoQuest for their support while working on the book, and last but not least, my wife, Yonsuk Song for her patience and love for this particular geek.

John Coggeshall

John is a columnist focusing in web technologies utilizing the PHP programming language in UNIX. He is also a private web development contractor for organizations such as the Michigan Council for Cooperative Education. His skillsets include C++, PHP4, Office Suites, UNIX and UNIX based OS, and SQL. John is specifically proficient in programming theory, recursive thinking, advanced algorithms, data structures, and working at great lengths in the UNIX environment.

Ken Egervari

Ken is a 21-year old entrepreneur from Windsor, Ontario CA who is a technology enthusiast and software architect. Ken has written several types of application ranging from networking to entertainment and the enterprise. He has used various languages such as Assembly, C, C++, Java, SQL, PHP, DHTML, and others.

Ken is now the Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of a business/technology consulting company called Positive Edge. Outside of Positive Edge, Ken actively participates on the Web by writing articles on web development and business on coffeecode.com and studies organic business modeling.

Martin Geisler

I've been interested in computers for several years now. It started with Windows 95, but two years ago I installed Linux. That became my favorite toy: it's free and it's incredibly fun to fiddle with.

After having installed Linux, a friend introduced me to PHP. I started learning the language, and became really fond of it. The great thing about PHP is that it doesn't limit you. You don't have to think about allocating and freeing memory – you just code. That makes it perfect for writing a "proof of concept". I've also liked mathematics for as long as I can remember. And now that I study Computer Science, I can see how math plays a big and interesting role in designing good and fast algorithms.

Apart from that, I live in Aarhus, Denmark. I enjoy seeing movies in the theaters, and can't wait to see The Lord of the Rings this Christmas. I read the trilogy this summer – a fantastic story.

Andrew Hill

Andrew is Director of Technology Evangelism for OpenLink Software, an enterprise middleware and data access infrastructure firm located in Burlington, MA. Andrew's position puts him squarely between the business and tech fronts of developing technology industries. He has been programming in PHP for a couple of years, coming to the PHP community initially to support the use of ODBC and database agnostic application connectivity. His technology interests also include XML, VSP, Mac OS X, and various other *nix technologies.

Chris Hubbard

Chris is the founder of and principal consultant for Wild Characters. Wild Characters provides web development to various clients in the telecom, health, gaming and business consulting industries. Chris has been working with Internet technologies since 1994 and has worked on projects ranging from an HTML sweat shop to working with a couple of the largest web sites. Chris is happily married with two wonderful children.

Note

Many thanks to the indulgence and tolerance given to me by my family while working on this book.

James Moore

James is currently living in Bristol having taken a year out in between completing his A-levels at Richard Huish College, Taunton and continuing his studies at university. He is spending this year both working and traveling.

Over the past two years, James has taken an active role within the PHP community as a member of the PHP quality assurance team and as the PHP-GTK manual editor. He has also contributed the Windows API extension to PHP's code base.

Devon O'Dell

Devon H. O'Dell has been programming applications for the web since 1998 using Perl CGI scripts, though now he uses JSP and PHP for these applications. He owns and operates SiteTronics (http://sitetronics.com), a company providing custom programming, networking, hosting, and security solutions. His applications have ranged from PHP language extensions to content management and templating systems, and he has also participated in operating system development. Additionally, Devon proposed and coauthored the book Professional PHP4 Multimedia Programming. Some of his recent projects include AMFPHP and ActionCrypt. Devon currently lives in Vorden, Netherlands. He would like to thank Margriet Homma for her support and care; Shawn T. Lawyer; and his parents, Dennis O'Dell and Meg Hudson.

Jon Parise

Jon is a long-time contributor to the PHP, PEAR, and Horde projects. He holds a bachelors degree in Information Technology from the Rochester Institute of Technology and is pursuing his masters in Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon University. He currently works as an independent consultant.

Harish Rawat

Harish is a software developer at Oracle corporation. He has over nine years of experience in systems programming. His technical areas of interest include XML, Java, and network protocols. Co-author of Professional PHP from Wrox; he has also contributed to other Wrox titles on Linux and Java both as an author and a reviewer.

Tarique Sani

Dr Sani is a pediatrician and forensic expert by education. Starting with the ZX80, he has been dabbling with computers for 19 years. He is currently the CTO of SANIsoft (http://www.sanisoft.com/), a web engineering company that specializes in PHP application development. He is based in Nagpur, India, where he lives with his wife Swati and four year old son Aasim.

Christopher Scollo

By day, Christopher Scollo is a seemingly ordinary software developer toiling away at his projects. But by night, he eats and sleeps. Other hobbies include hiking, cycling, teaching courses about web technologies, and being very polite to people. Many of his personality traits can be connected in one way or another to his use of the vi editor. Originally from New Jersey, USA, he now lives in Munich, Germany with his wife, Nicole Bator.

Deepak Thomas

Deepak is a member of technical staff with Oracle corporation in Redwood Shores, CA. Co-author of Professional PHP from Wrox; he has also contributed to other Wrox titles on Linux and Java both as an author and a reviewer. His interests include Linux, J2EE technologies, and web site deployment issues.

Chris Ullman

Chris is a Computer Science graduate who came to Wrox five years ago, when 14.4 modems were the hottest Internet technology and Netscape Navigator 2.0 was a groundbreaking innovation. Since then he's applied his knowledge of HTML, server-side web technologies, Java, and Visual Basic to developing, editing, and authoring books.

When not trying to reconstruct the guts of his own PC or trying to write extra chapters in a hurry, he can be found either playing keyboards in a psychedelic band, The Beemen, tutoring his cats in the way of eating peacefully from their own food bowl and not the one next to theirs, or hoping against hope that this is the year his favorite soccer team, Birmingham City, can manage to end their exile from the Premier League.