PHP 5 advanced. Visual quickpro guide

If you’re looking at this book, then I probably don’t need to tell you how great PHP is.
Presumably, since you’re perusing the pages of an advanced text on the topic, you are
already using PHP for developing dynamic Web sites. Maybe you’ve been doing so for
a couple of years, perhaps just a couple of months. You could have learned PHP on your
own, in a class, or by reading one of the many excellent books on the subject. (I’m
referring not just to my own, of course!) Whatever the case, with some experience
under your belt, you probably don’t want another “here’s how to use PHP and isn’t it
swell” book. What you probably want to learn is how to use PHP more efficiently, more
securely, faster, and all-around better than you already are. If so, you’ve found the
right book.
In this humble author’s (or not-so-humble author’s) opinion, advanced PHP is about
learning: how to do different things, how to improve upon the basic things, and about
technologies that intersect with PHP. In short, you know how to make a dynamic Web
site with PHP, but you’d like to know how to make a betterWeb site, with every possible
meaning of “better.” That’s the approach I’ve taken in writing this book. I’ve not set
out to blow your mind discussing esoteric idiosyncrasies the language has, rewriting
the PHP, MySQL, or Apache source code, or making theoretically interesting but
practically useless code. In short, I present to you several hundred pages of beyond-thenorm
but still absolutely necessary (and often cool) tips and techniques.