FIFTH EDITION Pantone: CMYK: Back in 2001, when I wrote the first edition of this book (it was called Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site with PHP & MySQL back then), readers were astonished to discover that you could create a site full of web pages without having to write a separate HTML file for each page. PHP stood out from the crowd of programming languages, mainly because it was easy enough for almost anyone to learn and free to download and install. The MySQL database, likewise, provided a simple and free solution to a problem that, up until that point, had been solvable only by expert programmers with.
