PHP CookBook

Acknowledgments

Most importantly, thanks to everyone who has contributed their time, creativity, and skills to making PHP what it is today. This amazing volunteer effort has created not only hundreds of thousands of lines of source code, but also comprehensive documentation, a QA infrastructure, lots of add-on applications and libraries, and a thriving user community worldwide. It's a thrill and an honor to add the PHP Cookbook to the world of PHP.

Thanks also our reviewers: Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Ike DeLorenzo, Rasmus Lerdorf, Adam Morton, Ophir Prusak, Kevin Tatroe, and Nathan Torkington. They caught plenty of bugs and offered many helpful suggestions for making the book better. We would like to specially single out Nat Torkington for flooding us with a plethora of useful changes and suggested additions.

All the folks at Student.Net Publishing, Student.Com, and TVGrid.Com provided a fertile environment for exploring PHP. Our experiences there in large part made this book possible. Bret Martin and Miranda Productions provided hosting and infrastructure that let us collaborate remotely while writing. We're only four miles from each other, but in Manhattan, that's remote.

Last, but far from least, thanks to our editor Paula Ferguson. From her shockingly quick (to our friends) acceptance of our modest book proposal to her final handling of our requests for last-minute revisions, she's guided the PHP Cookbook with a steady hand through the O'Reilly publishing process. Without her, this book would never have made the transformation from idea into reality.

David Sklar

Thanks to Adam for writing this book with me (and catching all the places I used too many parentheses).

Thanks to my parents, who didn't really know what they were getting into when they bought me that 4K Radio Shack Color Computer 20 years ago.

Thanks to Susannah for unwavering love and support, and for reminding me at crucial moments that life's not a paragraph.

Adam Trachtenberg

It is hard to express the size of my debt to David for putting up with me over the course of working together on the PHP Cookbook. His comments drastically improved my writing and his unwavering punctuality helped keep me close to schedule.

Thanks to Coleco and its Adam computer, for making me the first kid on the block able to own a computer named after himself.

Thanks to all my friends and business-school classmates who grew tired of hearing me say "Sorry, I've got to go work on the book tonight" and who still talked to me after I took two weeks to return their phone calls.

A special thanks to Elizabeth Hondl. Her childlike fascination with web technologies proves that if you ask often enough, you just might make it in the book.

Thanks to my brother, parents, and entire family. So much of me comes from them. Their encouragement and love sustains me.