Advance your Skills as a PHP Developer: Working with Data

Learn how to access and manipulate databases using the object-oriented PHP extensions PDO and MySQLi.

Now that PHP has true object-oriented capabilities, it's best practice to access databases using PDO (PHP Data Objects) and MySQLi. These methods produce database-neutral code that works with over a dozen systems, including MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Learn how to use PDO and MySQLi to perform basic select, insert, update, and delete operations; improve security with prepared statements; and use transactions to execute multiple queries simultaneously. Author David Powers also covers advanced topics like instantiating custom objects, and compares PDO to MySQLi so you can decide which method is right for you.

Add dynamic, asynchronously loading content to websites to make them more modern, professional, and user friendly, with Ajax and PHP.

Learn how to consume REST APIs using Guzzle, a PHP HTTP client that makes it easy to send HTTP requests and integrate with web services.