The purpose of this book is bring the power and ease of use of PHP to anyone with a desire to learn PHP and in doing so join the tens of thousands of web developers who have already discovered the flexibility and productivity that comes with using PHP. The book is intended to cover all aspects of PHP. It starts by covering the history of PHP before providing a high level overview of how PHP works and why it is so useful to web developers. It then moves on to cover each area of PHP in detail from the basics of the scripting language through to object oriented programming file and file system handling and MySQL and SQLite database integration. In addition chapters are also provided covering the creation and handling of HTML based forms and maintaining state using both cookies and PHP sessions. Each topic area is accompanied by extensive real world examples intended to bring theory to life. It is anticipated that the typical reader already has some web based experience at least in terms of understanding the concepts of a web server and creating HTML based content. While prior programming and scripting experience will be beneficial to the reader this book is designed such that even the non-programmer can quickly get up to speed with PHP.