PHP 5/MySQL Programming- P9:computer programming has often been seen as a difficult and arcane skill. Programming languages are difficult and complicated, out of the typical person’s reach. However, the advent of the World Wide Web has changed that to some extent. It’s reasonably easy to build and post a Web page for the entire world to see. The language of the Web is reasonably simple, and numerous applications are available to assist in the preparation of static pages | 18 PHP 5 MySQL Programming for the Absolute Beginner You can determine whether PHP added support for MySQL by looking again at the results of the phpInfo function. If exposing the extension didn t work on its own you may have to locate the l i file and move it to the C Windows directory. I also added support for two graphics libraries that I occasionally use. The gd2 library allows me to build and modify graphics and ming allows me to create Flash movies. Don t worry about exposing these files until you re comfortable with basic PHP programming. However when you re ready it s really nice to know that you can easily add to the PHP features by supporting new modules. Some of the documentation that came with version of PHP indicated that MySQL support is built in and doesn t need to be added through the configuration J file. In fact this information is inside the configuration file as a comment. When I ran phpInfo I found that MySQL support was not built in so I added it through the extension command. The sad truth is you can t always trust the documentation. Take a look at the extension_dir variable in to see where PHP expects to find all your extension files. Any .dll file in that directory can be an extension. You can also download new extensions and install them when you are ready to expand PHP s capabilities. Because of space limitations I was unable to include information on graphics programming in PHP in this book. However you can always check on my PHP Web site http 18011 n342 for examples and tutorials on these techniques. Creating the Tip of the Day Program Way back at the beginning of this chapter I promised that you would be able to write the featured Tip of the Day program. This program requires HTML CSS and one line of PHP code. The code shows a reasonably basic page html head title Tip of the day title head body center 19 h1 Tip of the day h1 div style border-color green border-style groove .
