Free Computer Books

This book could not have been written without feedback from our technical
reviewers; therefore, we would like to thank Marcus Börger, Steph Fox, Martin
Jansen, and Rob Richards for their excellent comments and feedback. Besides
these four reviewers, there are a few more people who helped answer several
questions during the writing of this book, more specifically Christian Stocker for
helping with the XML chapter, Wez Furlong and Sara Golemon for answering
questions about the streams layer, Pierre-Alain Joye for providing some insights
in the inner workings of the GD library, and less specifically the PEAR commu-
nity for their support and dedication to a great repository of usable PEAR com-
ponents. Some sections in this book were contributed by co-authors; Georg
Richter contributed the MySQLi section of the database chapter, and Zeev
Suraski added the section on Zend’s Performance Suite.
We would also like to thank Mark L. Taub and the editorial team of Pear-
son PTR for the things they are good at doing: organizing, planning, and mar-
keting this book, and making sure everything fits together. Thanks to Janet
Valade, for helpful developmental editing support, and our project editor
Kristy Hart, who helped us wrap up the book under pressure and put the final
touches on it.
Enjoy!
Andi, Stig, and Derick

Chapter 15, “An Introduction to Writing PHP Extensions,” explains how
to write your own custom PHP extension. We use a simple example to explain
the most important things like parameter parsing and resource management.
Chapter 16, “PHP Shell Scripting,” shows you how to write shell scripts
in PHP, because PHP is useful for more than just web applications. We care-
fully explain the differences between the CLI and CGI executables in which
PHP comes, including command-line parameter parsing and process control.
This book also includes three appendices. Appendix A, “PEAR and PECL
Package Index,” provides an overview of all important packages, with descrip-
tions and dependencies on other packages. Appendix B, “phpDocument Format
Reference,” explains the syntax as understood by the PHP Documenter tool to
generate API documentation from source code. Appendix C, “Zend Studio
Quick Start,” is an introduction to working in the Zend Studio IDE.

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AUDIENCE
This book is an introduction to the advanced features new to PHP 5. It is writ-
ten for PHP programmers who are making the move to PHP 5. Although
Chapter 2, “PHP 5 Basic Language,” contains an introduction to PHP 5 syn-
tax, it is meant as a refresher for PHP programmers and not as a tutorial for
new programmers. However, web developers with experience programming
other high-level languages may indeed find that this tutorial is all they need
in order to begin working effectively with PHP 5.

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Within the last few years, PHP has grown to be the most widespread web plat-
form in the world, operational in more than a third of the web servers across
the globe. PHP’s growth is not only quantitative but also qualitative. More and
more companies, including Fortune companies, rely on PHP to run their busi-
ness-critical applications, which creates new jobs and increases the demand
for PHP developers. Version 5, due to be released in the very near future, holds
an even greater promise.
While the complexity of starting off with PHP remains unchanged and
very low, the features offered by PHP today enable developers to reach far
beyond simple HTML applications. The revised object model allows for large-
scale projects to be written efficiently, using standard object-oriented method-
ologies. New XML support makes PHP the best language available for pro-
cessing XML and, coupled with new SOAP support, an ideal platform for
creating and using Web Services.

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