As my grandfather always says, "If you want something done right, do it yourself." However, these days you often have to rely on third-party tools to help you get your job done. To serve even a simple, static HTML Web page you need to rely on your Web server, which in turn relies on your operating system, and so on. While you can't create all these programs yourself, most of the ones that you rely on?your Web server, for example?provide an API to help you extend and add functionality to these programs, so if they don't meet your needs you can always modify them.
PHP?or more properly the PHP Hypertext Preprocessor?lets you easily create dynamic Web sites by embedding code into the Web page (HTML) itself. This open-source software is very popular on the Web where open-source products like Apache and Perl predominate. While PHP offers considerable power as a scripting language, its true power lies in the fact that if it doesn't offer what you need, you can easily extend it with either C or C++. To extend PHP 4, you need to understand the PHP API (more specifically the Zend API, since PHP 4 is powered by the Zend Engine).
As is the case with data compression in general the greatest savings to are to be made when the formats to be compressed are of a textual nature. Whilst ASCII or HTML files can be easily compressed using gzip by 75% or more, already optimized files formats such as JPEG's, executable or archive files tend not to compress as well if at all.
Alternating row colors is a very good way to make big tables more ergonomic and esthetic. Script and explanation here. Also explains the modulus operator.
This tutorial is designed for an advanced PHP programmer. It assumes you know how to handle cookies. (See Feedback with a Cookie to learn about using cookies.) You should also know how to pass data from one page to another using the POST and GET methods
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