Beginning PHP and Oracle From Novice to Professional by W. Jason Gilmore and Bob Bryla

W. JASON GILMORE has been obsessing over all things open source for more than ten years, with a primary focus on Web development technologies. He has been extensively published in publications such as Developer.com, TechTarget, and Linux Magazine, with his writings adopted for use within the United Nations and Ford Foundation educational programs. Jason is the author of four books, including the best-selling Beginning PHP and MySQL 5
Jason spends his days running Apress’s open source program and his
evenings writing, coding, and consulting.
educating the development community. When not in front of the computer, Jason can typically be found dreaming up home-remodeling projects, playing chess, and making homemade pasta. In his effort to occasionally get away from the keyboard, he recently bought, of all things, a piano.

BOB BRYLA is an Oracle 9i and 10g Certified Professional with more than
20 years of experience in database design, database application development, training, and database administration. He is an Internet database analyst and Oracle DBA at Lands’ End, Inc., in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. He is the author of several other Oracle DBA books for both the novice and seasoned
professional.

Mahatma Gandhi once famously said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Although there’s not yet any clear winner, the software industry seems to
be following a similar path. Although the open source movement began back in the 1970s due to Richard Stallman’s printer-borne frustrations in an MIT computer lab, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the community-driven approach to software development began to make any significant waves in the business environment.
And with it came gasps of both horror and hilarity among the proprietary software elite. After all, a bunch of volunteers could hardly produce code of a quality approaching, let alone surpassing, that which is built in the hallowed cathedrals of software development, right? Such guffaws rang increasingly loudly despite numerous clear successes in the open source community, such as the Apache dominating position in the Web server market and Linux’s meteoric rise to become one of the world’s most popular operating systems.
But soon it became apparent this approach did work after all, as was evidenced by the rapid adoption of open source solutions for commonplace tasks such as code editing, FTP transfer, file compression, databasing, and word processing. The commercial software industry responded with overt attempts to discredit the competing open source competitors, highlighting feature deficiencies, scaling problems, lack of traditional user support, and anything else that would justify its products’ often hefty price tags.
Yet more recently, many traditional software developers are coming to the conclusion that a more cooperative attitude must be adopted if they are going to survive, let alone compete, in this brave new world. Many have even determined that open source is actually a beneficial part of the ecosystem and are making great strides toward not only making sure their software interoperates with open source projects but also offering considerable contributions by way of resources and even code.
One of the most exciting such instances of the opportunities that can arise from such efforts is the ability to use PHP, an open source project that also happens to be the world’s most popular programming language for dynamic Web development, with Oracle, a proprietary database that also happens to be the world’s most popular solution for managing data. Although for some time it has been possible to use PHP and Oracle together, only recently have these efforts really begun to pay off because of increased activities in both camps by way of not only improvements to the interface but also to the creation of learning resources, documentation, and other utilities.
It seems as with most things in life, the success of the software development industry does not
lie squarely within one extreme approach but rather somewhere in between. We hope this book will highlight the riches that can be wrought from a successful collaboration between the two.

Who This Book Is For

Although this book presumes the reader has no prior experience using PHP or Oracle, seasoned users of these technologies may find it equally satisfactory because the authors have strived to create a book that strikes a balance between tutorial and reference. Our goal is to provide you with a resource that can be repeatedly referred to as you progress from a novice to an experienced developer.

Although basic introductions are often provided, this book does not seek to teach you funda- mental programming concepts. After all, the book is not titled Beginning Programming with PHP and Oracle. And it does not teach you HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). If you are a program- ming novice or are not yet versed in the aforementioned Web technologies, consider picking up one or several of the fine Apress books covering these topics.