Essential PHP Tools

David Sklar is an instructor at The New School University and an independent technology consultant. He is coauthor of the book PHP Cookbook and the author of the Learning PHP. David has spoken at many conferences, including the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, the EGovOS Open Source/Open Standards Conference, and the International PHP Conference. His consulting practice focuses on interactive Internet applications, distributed systems, scalability, and security. Additionally, David is a principal of the Transparency Project, a nonprofit organization that coordinates data markup standards and builds tools that analyze publicly available political and campaign finance information. David was a founder and the chief technology officer of both Student.Com and TVGrid.Com, where he led teams of PHP developers that built multilingual data-driven web applications. He holds a degree in computer science from Yale University.

From the reviews: "This book intends to simplify programming tasks through the use ... . The intended audience is intermediate-to-advanced, although I believe it is also of great use to the uninitiated. The Introduction provides a solid introduction to the use of PEAR ... . The section on databases is required reading for anyone wishing to ... . The Smarty chapter is an excellent introduction into templating ... . Especially enjoyable is the chapter on PEAR's Mail_mime ... . I particularly enjoyed the level of detail given ... ." (Mitchell Pirtle, International PHP Magazine, Issue no. 4, 2004)

• Part One Databases Chapter 1 Accessing Databases with DB Chapter 2 Accessing Databases with ADODB Part Two HTML Chapter 3 Using HTML_QuickForm for Form Processing Chapter 4 Templating with Smarty Part Three XML Chapter 5 Performing Event-Based XML Parsing with XML Parser Chapter 6 Developing Lightweight Web Services with XML_RPC Chapter 7 Developing Heavyweight Web Services with SOAP Chapter 8 Performing Easier XML Parsing with SimpleXML Part Four Networking Chapter 9 Sending Mail Chapter 10 Working with Authentication, Users, and Passwords Part Five Debugging, Caching, and Optimizing Chapter 11 Understanding PHP Internals Chapter 12 Profiling and Debugging with Xdebug Chapter 13 Accelerating with Code Caches