Although we omitted this on purpose in Chapter 5, PHP, PHP has features found in object-oriented programming languages. So, rather than write functions, you can instead create objects and write methods for them. This is exactly how the PHP programming interface to MySQL works: there is one dedicated object, mysqli, and a number of methods. With these methods, you can connect to a database, submit queries, fetch the result, and finally close the connection.

Consider that we have a web application that is an online bookstore. The name of our database is bookstore, for which we created a user bookuser, with book**4u as the password. The database itself contains at a minimum the table's books and authors.

Let's write our first PHP program using MySQL now.