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One of PHP’s greatest strengths happens to be one of its greatest weaknesses as well: PHP is easy to learn. Many people are attracted to the language because of this, not realizing that it’s a lot tougher to learn how to do it right.

PHP engine is typically used with Apache server under POSIX-compatible operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, other UNIX clones, etc.). However PHP itself isn’t dependent on a particular web-server or operating system.

MySQL AB actively maintain several versions of their database software, and determining which version to install can be somewhat confusing. From a security point of view the decision is further complicated by the fact that additional security features are often available in ‘alpha’ versions but not in the current ‘production’ version.

In PHP 5, extensions written in C can overload almost every aspect of the object syntax. It also allows PHP code to overload a limited subset that is most often needed. This section covers the overloading abilities that you can control from your PHP code.

With PHP 5’s brand new object model, PHP 5 has become a language that leverages the power and flexibility of object-oriented programming in a number of useful ways. Like most object-oriented languages, PHP 5 allows the developer to take advantage of interfaces, abstract classes, private/public/protected access modifiers, static members and methods, exception handling, and other [...]

“An Introduction to Writing PHP Extensions,” explains how to write your own custom PHP extension. Chapter 16, “PHP Shell Scripting,” shows you how to write shell scripts in PHP, because PHP is useful for more than just web applications. We carefully explain the differences between the CLI and CGI executables in which PHP comes, including [...]

PHP 5 in Practice is a reference guide that provides developers with easy-to-use and easily extensible code to solve common PHP problems. It focuses on providing real code solutions to problems, allowing the reader to learn by seeing exactly what is happening behind the scenes to get your solution.

Apache’s ErrorDocument directive can come in handy. For example, this line in your Apache configuration file:
ErrorDocument 404 /error.php
Can be used to redirect all 404 errors to a PHP script. The following server variables are of interest:

$REDIRECT_ERROR_NOTES – File does not exist: /docroot/bogus
$REDIRECT_REQUEST_METHOD – GET