Upgrading to PHP 5

Mehr zum Buch

If you're using PHP 4, an upgrade to PHP 5 is likely on the horizon, especially with its exciting new features. While a comprehensive reference guide is useful, experienced PHP programmers need a focused resource that addresses their immediate questions: what's new, what's different, and how to leverage these changes effectively. This guide is specifically tailored for PHP developers familiar with PHP 4, concentrating on PHP 5's new features rather than covering the entire language. It provides a concise comparison of PHP 4 and PHP 5, detailing improvements and showcasing side-by-side code examples to illustrate how the new features simplify common PHP challenges. Each feature is presented with code snippets, clarifying its purpose, optimal usage, and advantages over PHP 4. Key topics include robust object-oriented programming enhancements, an improved MySQL extension supporting prepared statements, a complete overhaul of XML support, simplified web services with SOAP, the SQLite embedded database, and cleaner error handling through exceptions. Written by Adam Trachtenberg, coauthor of the PHP Cookbook, this guide allows you to dive straight into PHP 5's innovations, ensuring you grasp both the practical and theoretical aspects by the end.