By Carl Burch, a professor for Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, USA. To contact the author, send e-mail to cburch at cburch dot c o m. [Other books by Carl Burch]

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
   1.1. About this book
   1.2. Two sides of Web programming
   1.3. About PHP

2. A brief look at HTML
   2.1. Tags and elements
   2.2. Attributes
   2.3. Entities
   2.4. A note on HTML versions
   2.5. Web page structure
   2.6. Glossary of significant tags

3. Simple programs
   3.1. A first program
   3.2. The echo statement
   3.3. Variables
   3.4. White space and capitalization

4. Accessing user information
   4.1. Creating forms
   4.2. Reading forms

5. Numbers and strings
   5.1. Operators
   5.2. Types
   5.3. Strings

6. Conditional execution
   6.1. if statements
   6.2. Booleans and conditions
   6.3. else and elseif clauses
   6.4. A note on indentation

7. Database access
   7.1. Database fundamentals
   7.2. Simple SQL retrieval
   7.3. PHP database functions
   7.4. Example database access

8. Repetition
   8.1. The while statement
   8.2. A multi-row SQL example
   8.3. Variable update shortcuts
   8.4. The for statement

9. More SQL
   9.1. Sorting results
   9.2. Joins
   9.3. Inserts
   9.4. Other SQL

10. More about forms
   10.1. Transmission methods
   10.2. Input elements
   10.3. Other form elements

11. HTTP

12. Input validation
   12.1. The preg_match function
   12.2. Regular expressions

13. Arrays
   13.1. Basics
   13.2. Example
   13.3. Array presence

14. Sessions
   14.1. Problem and solution
   14.2. Putting it together: A page counter
   14.3. Forum example using sessions
   14.4. How sessions work

15. Security concerns
   15.1. General warnings
   15.2. At browser
   15.3. At Web server
   15.4. At database
   15.5. At other computers