The IBM i Programmer's Guide to PHP

Specially Discounted "Scratch & Dent" Copy

"At long last, here is the perfect book to recommend to anyone who is considering adopting PHP for IBM i development." --Mike Pavlak Solutions Consultant, Zend Technologies, Inc.

This is the first book to comprehensively address PHP and how it can—and should—be deployed on the IBM i. With this IBM i-specific point of view, the authors examine how to transfer skills from a green screen environment to the Web, become intimately familiar with PHP’s commonly used features, and help start down the road of highly interactive Web-based application development.

For decades, the green screen has been the ubiquitous interface into an organization’s data. But with the advent of HTML, the Internet, and the browser, combined with the end user’s existing familiarity with the Web, green-screen developers are seeing much of the demand for their skills diminish in favor of more Web-enabled technologies. One of those technologies is the PHP programming language.

A flexible, forgiving programming style makes PHP easier to learn, and is just one of the many reasons PHP tops the list when developers seek to improve their Web-related skills. While not limited to Web development, PHP is designed from the ground up to be the ideal environment to easily build simple or complex Web-based applications in the most effective manner possible, while still giving programmers the control they need.

With this book you will learn to:
   • Build basic PHP applications and how to structure them
   • Access local and remote resources, as well as external data sources
   • Manage persistence between requests and the life of an individual request
   • from browser to server to browser
   • Tap System i DB2 database tables from PHP
   • Install and access MySQL databases on the System i



Kevin Schroeder, Technology Evangelist for Zend Technologies, is well-versed in a wide variety of technologies pertinent to both small- and large-scale application deployments. He has developed production software using PHP and many other languages. Kevin also has extensive experience as a system administrator on Linux, Solaris, Windows, and other platforms on scales of a single server up to several hundred servers on installations ranging from a few to millions of users.

Jeff Olen is co-founder of Olen Business Consulting, a provider of custom System i software solutions. He has over 20 years of experience with IBM midrange systems, including all the incarnations of the System i. His company has developed PHP applications on the System i for a wide variety of companies and continues to assist companies in switching to PHP.

More About the Authors:

Jeff Olen
Kevin Schroeder