Chapter 1 gives an overview of PDO along with a few features likes single interface for creating a connection, connection strings, uniform statement methods, and use of exceptions and a singe system of error codes.

Chapter 2 helps to get you started with PDO, by creating a sample database and then by creating a connection object. It also introduces PDOStatement classes.

Chapter 3 deals with various error-handling processes and their uses.

Chapter 4 introduces prepared statements. It deals with using prepared statements without binding values, binding a variable, and binding a parameter to a prepared statement. We also take a look at how to work with BLOBs using streams so that we do not risk query failures.

Chapter 5 helps us determine the number of rows in the returned result set. Also, we come across a new concept—scrollable cursors, which allow us to fetch subsets of rows from a result set.

Chapter 6 talks about advanced uses of PDO and includes setting connection parameters, transactions, and methods of PDO and the PDOStatement class.

Chapter 7 gives an example, where creation of the method part of an MVC application is discussed.

Appendix A explains the object-oriented features like inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, and exception handling.

This book is targeted at PHP programmers, who are considering migrating to PHP 5 and using the new database connection abstraction library, PHP Data Objects. While PDO is fully object oriented, the familiarity with this programming paradigm is required. Novice users who are not familiar with PHP 5's object-oriented features may consider reading Appendix A first so that they can follow the code examples in this book.

We assume that the reader is familiar with SQL, at the level of creating tables and making simple SELECT queries as well as updates. Our examples are based on MySQL and SQLite databases as these are the most used options and the only ones available at most cheap hosting providers.

At the end of this book we will present a more advanced example which may be of interest to expert programmers with deeper knowledge of SQL and programming concepts.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "PostgreSQL users might have already used pg_prepare() and pg_execute() pair."

A block of code will be set as follows:

// Assume we also want to filter by make
$sql = 'SELECT * FROM cars WHERE make=?';
$stmt = $conn->prepare($sql);
$stmt->execute(array($_REQUEST['make']));

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:

// Assume we also want to filter by make
$sql = 'SELECT * FROM cars WHERE make=?';
$stmt = $conn->prepare($sql);

$stmt->execute(array($_REQUEST['make']));

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "You can simply click on the Authors link located on the books listing page in your browser ".

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