A common challenge faced by PHP programmers is how to accept files uploaded by visitors to your site. In this bonus excerpt from Chapter 12 of the recently published SitePoint book: Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL (4th Edition), you’ll learn how to accept file uploads from your web site visitors securely and store them.

In this chapter you’ll bring together PHP and MySQL, which you’ll have seen separately in the previous chapters, to create some of your first database driven web pages. You’ll explore the basic techniques of using PHP to retrieve information from a database and display it on the Web in real time. I’ll also show you how to use PHP to create web-based forms for adding new entries to, and modifying existing information in, a MySQL database on the fly.

Here's where the fun really starts. In this chapter, we'll introduce you to the PHP scripting language, which can be used to easily build dynamic web pages that present up-to-the-moment information to your visitors. Readers with previous programming experience will probably be able to get away with a quick skim of this chapter, as we explain the essentials of the language from the ground up. This is a must-read chapter for beginners, however, as the rest of this series relies heavily on the basic concepts presented here.

Although we're sure you'll be anxious to get started building dynamic web pages, this chapter begins with an introduction to databases in general, and the MySQL relational database management system in particular.