Like most programming languages, PHP comes with a fairly full-featured set of functions for date

Find real-world solutions to PHP programming problems

Simplify and shorten the PHP application development cycle using the in-depth information contained in this hands-on guide. PHP Programming Solutions clearly lays out more than 250 programming challenges alongside practical solutions, functioning code, detailed explanations, and usage tips.

Inside, you'll learn to manipulate strings and arrays, work with HTML and Web pages, accept and validate user input, parse XML code, and resolve programming problems using PEAR and PECL widgets and extensions. Plus, you'll get detailed coverage of PHP security issues, SQL database interaction, debugging techniques, and error processing.

• Work with numbers, strings, dates, times, files, and directories
• Build complex data structures using PHP's array manipulation API
• Use functions and classes to build modular, reusable code 
• Create, update, and cache HTML documents and Web content
• Obtain and process user input submitted via online forms
• Protect, log, and debug PHP script actions
• Authenticate and track users with sessions and cookies
• Traverse, validate, and transform XML documents
• Store and retrieve data from MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle databases
• Interface with different server types, network protocols, and file formats
• Perform efficient exception handling and error processing

Vikram Vaswani is the founder and CEO of Melonfire (www.melonfire.com), a company specializing in content creation and syndication. He is the author of MySQL: The Complete Reference and How to Do Everything with PHP and MySQL.