Consisting of 24 one-hour lessons, Sams Teach Yourself PHP4 in 24 Hours is divided into five sections that guide you through the language from the basics to the advanced functions. The first section of the book teaches the fundamentals of PHP. Building upon what has been taught in the first section, sections two through four show you how to apply that knowledge in order to interact with the user by creating and managing forms, cookies and authentication. It also teaches how to access databases and how to integrate system components, e-mail, LDAP, network sockets and much more. The final section of the book covers advanced functionality including how to debug and optimize scripts, maintain script security, and extend PHP with API.Learn to create server-based Web applications,CD-ROM contains the complete PHP4 program and Apache Web server in binary and source distributions for various Linux distributions and Windows as well as the (MySQL) database for Linux. and all source code

Table of Contents:
Part I: Getting Started ..... 5 Hour 1: PHP: From Home Page to Portal ..... 7 Hour 2: Installing PHP ..... 15 Hour 3: A First Script ..... 25 Part II: The Language ..... 35 Hour 4: The Building Blocks ..... 37 Hour 5: Going with the Flow ..... 57 Hour 6: Functions ..... 73 Hour 7: Arrays ..... 93 Hour 8: Objects ..... 111 Part III: Working with PHP ..... 135 Hour 9: Working with Forms ..... 137 Hour 10: Working with Files ..... 159 Hour 11: Working with the DBM Functions ..... 179 Hour 12: Database Integration-MySQL ..... 195 Hour 13: Beyond the Box ..... 215 Hour 14: Working with Dynamic Images ..... 233 Hour 15: Working with Dates ..... 255 Hour 16: Working with Data ..... 269 Hour 17: Working with Strings ..... 285 Hour 18: Working with Regular Expressions ..... 303 Hour 19: Saving State with Cookies and Query Strings ..... 321 Hour 20: Saving State with Session Functions ..... 337