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Title - Wicked Cool PHP
Author - Dave Roman, GCPCUG Member
Category - Book
Subject - Real-World scripts that solve difficult problems
Date - September 2008

WickedCoolPHPRoman0908.jpgPHP is a scripting language that can be used for creating web features and it’s fairly easy to use (if you are a programmer). This Starch Press book, by William Steinmetz with Brian Ward, contains scripts to process credit cards, check the validity of email addresses, template HTML, and serve dynamic images and text.

There are many coded examples in this book, but it is not for amateurs. You should know the basics of PHP in order to understand the chapters in this book.

Chapter One – The FAQS of Life
Contains quick solutions to everyone’s favorite little tasks and problems. Some of the scripts used are: How to add Previous/Next links to your shopping cart,
Highlighting alternate row colors in a table. Sorting and Printing an Array. He even shows you how to create templates with Smarty which is located at http://smarty.php.net

Chapter Two – Configuring PHP
Find out how you SHOULD configure PHP. Apparently a large number of problems arise from misconfiguration.

Chapter Three – PHP Security
This chapter tells you how to keep your scripts secure. You’ll get some security guidelines like don’t trust forms and turn off global variables.

Chapter Four – Working with Forms
Here they teach you how to get user input from forms and other dynamic input sources. One of the scripts that gives a coded example is one that validates a credit card.

Chapter Five – Working with Text and HTML
Shows you how to process text and strings with a number of tools.

Chapter Six – Working with Dates
How to work with time and dates in PHP and MYSQL.

Chapter Seven – Working with Files
deals with file manipulation.

Chapter Eight – User and Session Tracking
Session Tracking and Management.

Chapter Nine – Working with Email.
This covers email manipulation.

Chapter Ten – Working with Images
covers image manipulation in emails.

Chapter Eleven – Using cURL to Interact with Web Services
Learn how to make your server interact with web services on other sites via XML. cURL is a PHP library that can help you connect between your webserver and other webservers. You can ask cURL to do anything from retrieving the HTML from a web page to directly accessing an XML based web service.

Chapter Twelve – Intermediate Projects
This chapter has 3 fun little projects that can be used in larger web sites. These projects build on what you’ve learned elsewhere in the book. The three projects are 1) a voting system, 2) an electronic card service and 3) a blog.

As you can see, it’s a good resource for creating PHP scripts. It is not a PHP tutorial.

TITLE: Wicked Cool PHP
February 2008, 197 pages, US $29.95
Authors: William Steinmetz with Brian Ward
ISBN 10: 1-593277-173-5
ISBN 13: 9781593271732
Starch Press, O’Reilly

Discount of 35% for User Group members
Use code: DSUG
http://www.oreilly.com
 
 
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