Book Image

Twilio Cookbook

By : Roger Stringer
Book Image

Twilio Cookbook

By: Roger Stringer

Overview of this book

Have you ever wanted to integrate phone features into a project you were working on? Maybe you wanted to send SMS messages to your customers about the latest sales? Maybe you want to set up a company directory with voice mail? Or maybe you want to add two factor authentication to your web sites to verify your users? Since Twilio was launched in 2007, developers have had a way to do these tasks. The power of Twilio's API is huge and lets you add any type of phone solution to your web site from 2-factor authentication for verifying your users, to setting up a company directory and a voice mail system. The possibilities are endless. "Twilio Cookbook" is your Swiss army knife for Twilio development, providing you with a number of clear step-by-step exercises. It helps you take advantage of the real power of the Twilio API, and gives you a good grounding in using it in your websites. This book looks at the Twilio API, and breaks down the mystery and confusion that surrounds adding telephone functionality to your websites. As you go through the recipes, you will learn how to take advantage of the Twilio API quickly and painlessly. You will learn how to build your own IVR system, company directory, and voicemail box, and also how to set up a 2-factor authentication system to verify users, track orders via SMS, send surveys using SMS, allow users to buy phone numbers, set up and delete sub-accounts, and check to see if a human is answering a phone call. We will also combine Twilio with other APIs to build a handy local search system such as a local business search, movie listings search, and web search. If you want to take advantage of using Twilio's API to add telephone functionality to your websites, then this book is for you. "Twilio Cookbook' will leave you with a black belt in Twilio development and enable you to integrate the API into your websites.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Twilio Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Why use PDO instead of the standard MySQL functions?


There are several ways to connect to a MySQL database in PHP. You can use mysql_* functions that have become deprecated, old, and slow. You can also use mysqli_* functions that are slowly replacing mysql_* functions; however, they are also slow.

PDO stands for PHP Data Objects; it recently replaced the original MySQL library for the purpose of talking to databases. It also has support for PostgreSQL and SQLite.

The PDO extension defines a lightweight, consistent interface for accessing databases in PHP. Each database driver that implements the PDO interface can expose database-specific features as regular extension functions.

PDO is also nice because it provides a data-access abstraction layer, which means that, regardless of the database you use, you employ the same functions to issue queries and fetch data.

The process we use to talk to our MySQL databases is a class called pdo.class.php. We use it to talk to our databases using the PDO...