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.

This classic, hands-on guide to learning all the tools, principles and techniques needed to build a fully functional database-driven web site using PHP and MySQL has been revised for its fourth edition. It remains essential reading for the budding developer.

Before you can start building your database-driven web presence, you must first ensure that you have the right tools for the job. In this first chapter, Kev will tell you where to obtain the two essential components you'll need: the PHP scripting language and the MySQL database management system. He'll also step you through the set-up procedures on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and show you how to test that PHP is operational on your web server. You'll even get to write your first PHP-driven web page.

There's no need to wait for the birth of PHP 6 to take advantage of many of its new features -- PHP 5.3 is just about to hatch, and brings with it a whole nest of goodies! In this article, Ben explains the most useful programming nuggets.

What's that? You're still building your PHP apps from scratch, without using the Zend framework? Let Toby show you how easy it is to build killer PHP 5 web applications with Zend -- like your very own music mashup that utilizes the Yahoo! APIs.

Prepare to learn a brand new method of pagination! In this practical tute, Lyndon steps through the Strategy Design Pattern, and shows how you can use it to abstract result pagination processing from your app.

Looking for ways to speed up your web site? Caching's the answer. Whether you want to ensure your content's cached, or guarantee that it's not, this tutorial has the solutions to your caching problems. In it, Ben shows how to manipulate http headers to control caching on the client side, and use server caching to make your site's performance skyrocket.