Wrox Press Ltd. was the publisher of earlier printings of this book, but Apress is the publisher of this printing. Therefore, all source code and support for this book can now be found at http://www.apress.com, even though references within the chapters may point to http://www.wrox.com.
Most good technical books have a vision behind them – some shared goal that helps the writers and editors produce a book with meaning and value. With this project we embarked to do just that, and believe that we have produced a resource for working PHP developers who need to take their skills to the next level.
Many PHP developers have "grown up" with PHP. They built their first dynamic home page with it and, as time passed and their knowledge grew, moved on to producing more complex web-based applications. In this book we have made a sincere effort to share the experience of highly skilled working PHP developers, and we want you to read this resource and stand testimony to our efforts.
This book aims to enable web developers to create state of the art web applications with PHP that are:
Scalable
Efficient
Secure
Modular
Multi-tiered
and more. This book goes beyond being an enumeration of the manual, to tackling the advanced concepts required to build successful large-scale web applications.
This book targets programmers whose grasp of PHP enables them to code and maintain small PHP web applications. Though PHP syntax is reviewed, we are assuming that programmers reading this book will not need an introduction into the conceptual basis of programming. We also assume an interest in programming web applications, specifically design of large web sites and general network programming.
We also assume that you have a conceptual familiarity with databases. Although we have included a primer on database fundamentals, a good knowledge of these systems will surely make it easier to comprehend some of the material in the book (in particular the examples in the database chapters and the case studies).