What you hold in your hands is the answer to all your PHP 5 needs. We have written PHP 5 Recipes with a number of purposes in mind.

First, this book is a source of instant solutions, including countless pieces of useful code that you can just copy and paste into your own applications, giving you answers fast and saving you hours of coding time.

Second, this book is a useful reference to the most important aspects of the PHP 5 language, including the vital functions you know and love from previous versions of PHP, as well as the functions introduced in PHP 5.

Finally, this book explains the PHP 5 functionality in detail, including the vastly improved object-oriented capabilities and the new MySQLi database extension.

We are confident PHP 5 Recipes will be a useful and welcome companion throughout your PHP journey, keeping you on the cutting edge of PHP development, ahead of the competition, and giving you all the answers you need, when you need them.

Nearly every non-trivial application requires data persistence, and for an application of any significant size and scope, persistence is typically achieved using a database. If you’re building or maintaining any significant application and are using MySQL, this book is for you. For open source and other types of projects, the MySQL database is a very popular choice: it’s free, fast, robust, and scalable, and it runs on all of the major platforms, allowing maximum use of available hardware resources. But it’s easy to disregard MySQL’s speed and other advantages if your database design is inefficient. Needlessly duplicating data, using improper types for columns, overloading a single table where multiple tables should be used, failing to leverage the calculation features of MySQL, and making multiple queries instead of an efficient single query are some of the common mistakes.

Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization shows you how to identify, overcome, and avoid gross inefficiencies. It demonstrates how to maximize the many data manipulation features that MySQL includes. This book explains how to include tests and branches in your queries, how to normalize your database, and how to issue concurrent queries to boost performance, among many other design and optimization topics. You’ll also learn about some features new to MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 like subqueries, stored procedures, and views, all of which will help you build even more efficient applications.

What you hold in your hands is the answer to all your PHP 5 needs. We have written PHP 5 Recipes with a number of purposes in mind.

First, this book is a source of instant solutions, including countless pieces of useful code that you can just copy and paste into your own applications, giving you answers fast and saving you hours of coding time.

Second, this book is a useful reference to the most important aspects of the PHP 5 language, including the vital functions you know and love from previous versions of PHP, as well as the functions introduced in PHP 5.

Finally, this book explains the PHP 5 functionality in detail, including the vastly improved object-oriented capabilities and the new MySQLi database extension.

We are confident PHP 5 Recipes will be a useful and welcome companion throughout your PHP journey, keeping you on the cutting edge of PHP development, ahead of the competition, and giving you all the answers you need, when you need them.

Nearly every non-trivial application requires data persistence, and for an application of any significant size and scope, persistence is typically achieved using a database. If you’re building or maintaining any significant application and are using MySQL, this book is for you. For open source and other types of projects, the MySQL database is a very popular choice: it’s free, fast, robust, and scalable, and it runs on all of the major platforms, allowing maximum use of available hardware resources. But it’s easy to disregard MySQL’s speed and other advantages if your database design is inefficient. Needlessly duplicating data, using improper types for columns, overloading a single table where multiple tables should be used, failing to leverage the calculation features of MySQL, and making multiple queries instead of an efficient single query are some of the common mistakes.

Beginning MySQL Database Design and Optimization shows you how to identify, overcome, and avoid gross inefficiencies. It demonstrates how to maximize the many data manipulation features that MySQL includes. This book explains how to include tests and branches in your queries, how to normalize your database, and how to issue concurrent queries to boost performance, among many other design and optimization topics. You’ll also learn about some features new to MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 like subqueries, stored procedures, and views, all of which will help you build even more efficient applications.