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This chapter has provided a bit of foreshadowing about this wonderful language to which much of this book is devoted. We looked first at PHP’s history, before outlining version 4 and 5’s core features, setting the stage for later chapters.

In Chapter 2, prepare to get your hands dirty, as you’ll delve into the PHP installation and configuration process. Although readers often liken most such chapters to scratching nails on a chalkboard, you can gain much from learning more about this process. Much like a professional cyclist or race car driver, the programmer with hands-on knowledge of the tweaking and maintenance process often holds an advantage over those without, by virtue of a better understanding of both the software’s behaviors and quirks. So grab a snack and cozy up to your keyboard; it’s time to build.

This chapter provided you with the information you need to establish an operational Apache/PHP server, and valuable insight regarding PHP’s run-time configuration options and capabilities. This was a major step, because you’ll now be able to use this platform to test examples throughout the remainder of the book.

In the next chapter, you’ll learn all about the basic syntactical properties of the PHP language. By its conclusion, you’ll be able to create simplistic yet quite useful scripts. This material sets the stage for subsequent chapters, where you’ll gain the knowledge required to start building some really cool applications.

Although the material presented here is not as glamorous as the material in later chapters, it is invaluable to your success as a PHP programmer, because all subsequent functionality is based on these building blocks. This will soon become apparent.

The next chapter is devoted to the construction and invocation of functions, reusable chunks of code intended to perform a specific task. This material starts you down the path necessary to begin building modular, reusable PHP applications.

This chapter concentrated on one of the basic building blocks of modern-day programming languages: reusability through functional programming. You learned how to create and invoke functions, pass information to and from the function block, nest functions, and create both recursive and variable functions. Finally, you learned how to aggregate functions together as libraries and include them into the script as needed.

The next chapter introduces PHP’s array functionality, covering the language’s vast array of management capabilities and introducing PHP 5’s new array-handling features.

Arrays play an indispensable role in programming, and are ubiquitous in every imaginable type of application, Web-based or not. The purpose of this chapter was to bring you up to speed regarding many of the PHP functions that will make your programming life much easier as you deal with these arrays.

The next chapter focuses on yet another very important topic: object-oriented programming. This topic has a particularly special role in PHP 5, because the process has been entirely redesigned for this major release.

This chapter introduced object-oriented programming fundamentals, followed by an overview of PHP’s basic object-oriented features, devoting special attention to those enhancements and additions that are new to PHP 5.

The next chapter expands upon this introductory information, covering topics such as inheritance, interfaces, abstract classes, and more.

This and the previous chapter introduced you to the entire gamut of PHP’s OOP features, both old and new. Although the PHP development team was careful to ensure that users aren’t constrained to use these features, the improvements and additions made regarding PHP’s ability to operate in conjunction with this important development paradigm represent a quantum leap forward for the language. If you’re an old hand at object-oriented programming, hopefully these last two chapters have left you smiling ear-to-ear over the long-awaited capabilities introduced within these pages. If you’re new to OOP, the material should help you to better understand many of the key OOP concepts and inspire you to perform additional experimentation and research.

The next chapter introduces yet another new, and certainly long-awaited, feature of PHP 5: exception handling.

The topics covered in this chapter touch upon many of the core error-handling practices used in today’s programming industry. While the implementation of such features unfortunately remains more preference than policy, the introduction of capabilities such as logging and error handling has contributed substantially to the ability of programmers to detect and respond to otherwise unforeseen problems in their code.

In the next chapter, we’ll take an in-depth look at PHP’s string-parsing capabilities, covering the language’s powerful regular expression features, and offering insight into many of the powerful string-manipulation functions.

Many of the functions introduced in this chapter will be among the most commonly used within your PHP applications, as they form the crux of the language’s string-manipulation capabilities.

In the next chapter, we’ll turn our attention toward another set of well-worn functions: those devoted to working with the file and operating system.

Although you can certainly go a very long way using solely PHP to build interesting and powerful Web applications, such capabilities are greatly expanded when functionality is integrated with the underlying platform and other technologies. As applied to this chapter, these technologies include the underlying operating and file systems. You’ll see this theme repeatedly throughout the remainder of this book, as PHP’s ability to interface with a wide variety of technologies like LDAP, SOAP, and Web Services is introduced.

In the next chapter, you’ll examine two key aspects of any Web application: Web forms and navigational cues.