The killer combination of PHP, MySQL database, and the Apache web server is by far the most popular set of dynamic web technologies in use on the web today. So why another PHP book? Well, not everyone who uses PHP is a programmer. PHP is the most common dynamic web language used by designers, if their web sites require dynamic functionality, and there are hordes of novice users who want to set up dynamic web sites. Code-heavy books are likely to be rather daunting to these non-programmers, so this book provides a more friendly, accessible, visual learning style. It takes the reader through the details of setting up their development environment and PHP code basics as painlessly as possible, and shows them how to wire together several real world PHP projects. The code is compatible with the latest versions of PHP (6) and MySQL (5,) but it is written to be backwards compatible with any older versions that readers might have available on their hosting servers. Special emphasis is also put on security (very important for effective PHP sites, but often overlooked by beginners - we teach it right from the start), and good site design (our PHP generates semantically-sound markup, which is then attractively styled using CSS.)