To Heather, Elizabeth, Matthew, and Jacob, and to all those who have called me Teacher. irst I thank Him from whom all flows. Heather, you always work harder on these books than I do. Thank you for your love and your support. Thank you Elizabeth, Matthew, and Jacob for understanding why Daddy was typing all the time. Thanks to the Open Source community for creating great free software like PHP and MySQL. Also, thanks to the phpMyAdmin team and the SQLite team for developing such terrific software and making it freely available. Thank you, Stacy Hiquet, for your continued support and encouragement on this and other projects. Thanks, Scott Harris. You did a great job of juggling all those balls around. Thanks to Tonya Cupp for drastically improving the readability of the manuscript. Arlie Hartman, thank you for technical editing and for putting together the CD-ROM. Thanks to J. Wynia (www.phpgeek.com) for technical editing. Thanks also to Jason for use of PHPTriad on the CD-ROM. Special thanks to those who worked on the first edition. Your hard work is the foundation for something even better. Thank you to the many members of the Premier/Course team who worked on this book. A huge thanks goes to my CSCI N399 and N452 Server-Side Web Development classes and the many people who sent in comments and advice from the first edi- tion. Thank you for being patient with my manuscript, for helping me spot many errors, and for providing invaluable advice. I learned as much from you as you did from me. A c k n o wl e d gm e n t s F ndy Harris began his teaching career as a high-school special education teacher. During that time, he taught himself enough computing to do part-time computer consulting and database work. He began teaching computing at the university level in the late 1980s as a part-time job. Since 1995 he has been a full-time lecturer in the Computer Science Department of Indiana University/Purdue University–Indianapolis, where he manages the Streaming Media Lab and teaches classes in several programming languages. His primary interests are PHP, Java, Microsoft languages, Perl, JavaScript, Web Data, virtual reality, portable devices, and streaming media. He has written numerous books on these and other technology topics. A b o u t t he A u t h o r A This page intentionally left blank C on t e n t s a t a G l a n c e Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxi Chapter 1: Exploring the PHP Environment . . . . . . . . . . .1 Chapter 2: Using Variables and Input . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Chapter 3: Controlling Your Code with Conditions and Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55 Chapter 4: Loops and Arrays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .95 Chapter 5: Better Arrays and String Handling . . . . . .133 Chapter 6: Working with Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .181 Chapter 7: Writing Programs with Objects . . . . . . . . .229 Chapter 8: XML and Content Management Systems . .271 Chapter 9: Using MySQL to Create Databases . . . . . .299 Chapter 10: Connecting to Databases within PHP . . . .335 Chapter 11: Data Normalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .359 Chapter 12: Building a Three-Tiered Data Application . .383 Appendix A: Reviewing HTML and Cascading Style Sheets . . . . . . . . . . . . .on cd Appendix B: Using SQLite as an Alternative Data Source . . . . . . . . . . . . .on cd Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .429 . time. Thanks to the Open Source community for creating great free software like PHP and MySQL. Also, thanks to the phpMyAdmin team and the SQLite team for developing such terrific software and. and for putting together the CD-ROM. Thanks to J. Wynia (www.phpgeek.com) for technical editing. Thanks also to Jason for use of PHPTriad on the CD-ROM. Special thanks to those who worked on. the Streaming Media Lab and teaches classes in several programming languages. His primary interests are PHP, Java, Microsoft languages, Perl, JavaScript, Web Data, virtual reality, portable devices, and