This book is an essential guide to some of the best free add-ons to PHP. These add-ons, or tools, provide invaluable functionality for improving your PHP Web applications, including accessing databases, generating robust Web forms, using page templating systems, creating and parsing XML documents, authenticating users, and much more.

In response to the existing shortage of documentation about the tools, Sklar packs this book with details about installing, configuring, and using each tool—along with plenty of examples tailored to PHP 4 and 5.

Sklar also lays out the details of Auth and HTML_QuickForm—two hard working PEAR modules—so you don’t have to code your own authentication system or Web form construction set! Also included are chapters on debugging programs, and increasing Web server speed. In short, you will learn to eliminate inefficiencies in PHP, and enhance performance without any code modification.

Table of contents:

Part One Databases
Chapter 1 Accessing Databases with DB
Chapter 2 Accessing Databases with ADODB
Part Two HTML
Chapter 3 Using HTML_QuickForm for Form Processing
Chapter 4 Templating with Smarty
Part Three XML
Chapter 5 Performing Event-Based XML Parsing with XML Parser
Chapter 6 Developing Lightweight Web Services with XML_RPC
Chapter 7 Developing Heavyweight Web Services with SOAP
Chapter 8 Performing Easier XML Parsing with SimpleXML
Part Four Networking
Chapter 9 Sending Mail
Chapter 10 Working with Authentication, Users, and Passwords
Part Five Debugging, Caching, and Optimizing
Chapter 11 Understanding PHP Internals
Chapter 12 Profiling and Debugging with Xdebug
Chapter 13 Accelerating with Code Caches