Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the MDB2 database abstraction layer. You will see how to connect to the database, instantiate MDB2 objects, execute queries and fetch data. There are a number of features and SQL syntax that are implemented differently in the database systems that MDB2 supports. MDB2 does its best to wrap the differences and provide a single interface for accessing those features, so that the developer doesn't need to worry about the implementation in the underlying database system. You will see how to use this SQL abstraction feature to provide auto-increment fields, perform "replace" queries that will update the records that already exist or do an insert otherwise, and make use of prepared statements, a convenient and security-conscious method of writing to the database. You will also learn about MDB2 modules and how to extend MDB2 to provide custom fetch and result classes, iterators, and modules.

Now that you've got data from your database, you want to display it.

Chapter 2 covers a range of PEAR packages commonly used for presenting data in different formats. You will see how to use HTML_Table and HTML_Table_Matrix to create and format tables, generate and format an Excel spreadsheet with the Excel_Spreadsheet_Writer package, create a flexible, pageable "datagrid" with Structures_Datagrid, and generate PDF documents on the fly with File_PDF.

XML is another favorite format for working with data, and PEAR does not let you down with its XML support.

InChapter 3 we take an in-depth look at working with XML in PEAR. The chapter covers creating XML documents using the XML_Util, XML_FastCreate, XML_Serializer, and XML_XUL packages. The chapter also covers reading XML documents using a SAX-based parser and transforming PHP objects into XML (and back again!) with XML_Serializer and XML_Unserialize.

Chapter 4 introduces you to PEAR's support for web services and Web APIs. You will learn about consuming SOAP and XML-RPC web services, access the Google API, search blog entries with Services_Technorati, access the Amazon web service, access the Yahoo API, and learn how to offer web services, either XML-RPC or SOAP based. You will also get a taste of offering a REST-based service with XML_Serializer.

Chapter 5 covers PEAR's date and time functions using PEAR::Calendar and PEAR::Date. You will learn about the benefits these packages offer over the standard PHP date and time functions, and then see how to create, manipulate, and compare Date objects, work with Date_Span arithmetic, handle timezones, keep track of public holidays with Date_Holiday, and use the Calendar class to display an HTML calendar.

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: "This class also provides a setId() method, which is called by the Label object when the artist is added to the list of signed artists."

A block of code will be set as follows:

function getDGInstance($type)
{
if (class_exists($type))
{
$datagrid =& new $type;
return $datagrid;
} else
{
return false;
}
}

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

$driver = Date_Holidays::factory($driverId, $year);
$internalNames = $driver->getInternalHolidayNames();

Any command-line input and output is written as follows:

$ pear-dh-compile-translationfile --help

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: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

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