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Who Should Read This Book?

This book will take you from the first principles through to a good working knowledge of the PHP programming language. No prior experience of programming is assumed, although if you have worked with a language such as C or Perl in the past, you will find the going much easier.

PHP is a Web programming language. To get the most from this book, you should have some understanding of the World Wide Web and of HTML in particular. If you are just starting out, you will still be able to use this book, although you should consider acquiring an HTML tutorial. If you are comfortable creating basic documents and can build a basic HTML table, you will be fine.

PHP is designed to integrate well with databases. Some of the examples in this book are written to work with SQL databases. We include a short introduction to SQL, but if you intend to use PHP to work with databases, you might want to spend some time reading up on the subject. Numerous introductory SQL tutorials are available online. If you intend to work with a database other than MySQL, many of the examples in this book will be relatively easy to reproduce with the equivalent PHP functions designed to query your database.

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