One of the great things about PHP is its vibrant and active community. Developers enjoy many online meeting points, including SitePoint Forums[1] where developers get together to help each other out with problems they face on a daily basis, from the basics of how PHP works, to solving design problems like “How do I validate a form?” As a way to get help, these communities are excellent—they’re replete with all sorts of vital fragments you’ll need to make your projects successful. But putting all that knowledge together into a solution that applies to your particular situation can be a problem. Often, community members assume other posters have some degree of knowledge; frequently, you might spend a considerable amount of time pulling together snippets from various posts, threads, and users (each of whom has a different programming style) to gain a complete picture.

The PHP Anthology is, first and foremost, a compilation of the best solutions provided to common PHP questions that turn up at the SitePoint Forums on a regular basis, combined with the experiences and insights I’ve gained from my work with PHP on a daily basis over the last four years.

What makes this book a little different from others on PHP is that it steps away from a tutorial style, and instead focuses on the achievement of practical goals with a minimum of effort. To that extent, you should be able to use many of the solutions provided here in a more or less “plug and play” manner, rather than
having to read this book from cover to cover.

That said, threaded throughout these discussions is a “hidden agenda.” As well as solutions, this book aims to introduce you to techniques that can save you effort, and help you reduce the time it takes to complete and later maintain your Web-based PHP applications.

Although it was originally conceived as a procedural programming language, in recent years PHP has proven increasingly successful as a language for the development of object oriented solutions. This was further compounded by the public opening in January 2003 of the PHP Application and Extension Repository[2] (PEAR), which provides a growing collection of reusable and well maintained solutions for architectural problems (such as Web form generation and validation) regularly encountered by PHP developers around the world.