Our original Foundation PHP for Flash title was rightly regarded as a must-have when it came to wanting to learn just how to make your Flash sites make use of backend technologies, that was published way back in the days of Flash 5 and PHP 4, and things move pretty fast in the world of web design!

This latest, completely rewritten, edition again brings together three of the web's hottest technologiesFlash, the server-side language PHP, and the MySQL database system. We've brought things back up to date, using ActionScript 2.0, PHP 5.0, and MySQL 4.1, the book has been designed to be version-neutral. In other words, you can be confident that you're working with the latest standards, but that your applications won't break if deployed on an older server. The book also provides a brief introduction to an alternative database system, SQLite, which is now automatically bundled with PHP 5 and requires no installation.

At each stage of the book you'll be given an overview of a new area of PHP/MySQL, introducing you to the syntax while showing how it compares to ActionScript, and how it integrates with Flash to produce increasingly complicated applications. For example, earlier chapters cover things such as getting data from PHP to Flash and back again, variables, arrays, string manipulation, validating user input, and feedback forms. Later on, it moves on to more advanced subjects such as creating databases via the MySQL console and via phpMyAdmin, manipulating database data via a Flash interface, displaying data from an RSS feed in Flash, persisting data with sessions, and creating a full blown content management system.

In addition, to get you up and running, the book features a detailed guide to setting up your environmentPHP, MySQL, and the Apache web serveralong with extensive troubleshooting information.

PHP is the language of choice on nearly 18 million domains, and MySQL has more than five million active users,including industry leaders like Google, the Associated Press, Sony, and NASA. They're open-source and free; and with the help of this book, you'll see that they're easy and fun to learn.

David Powers is an Adobe Community Expert for Dreamweaver and author of a series of highly successful books on PHP, including PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy and Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. As a professional writer, he has been involved in electronic media for more than 30 years, first with BBC radio and television and more recently with the Internet. His clear writing style is valued not only in the English-speaking world; several of his books have been translated into Spanish and Polish. What started as a mild interest in computing was transformed almost overnight into a passion, when David was posted to Japan in 1987 as BBC correspondent in Tokyo. With no corporate IT department just down the hallway, he was forced to learn how to fix everything himself. When not tinkering with the innards of his computer, he was reporting for BBC television and radio on the rise and collapse of the Japanese bubble economy. Since leaving the BBC to work independently, he has built up an online bilingual database of economic and political analysis for Japanese clients of an international consultancy. When not pounding the keyboard writing books or dreaming of new ways of using PHP and other programming languages, David enjoys nothing better than visiting his favorite sushi restaurant. He has also translated several plays from Japanese.

Getting Ready to Work with PHP.- Flash Breaks Free.- Calculations and Decisions.- Of Strings and Things.- Working Smarter with Arrays and Loops.- PHP and Databases: Packing Real Power Behind Your Applications.- Playing with Words.- Creating a User Registration Database.- Protecting Your Data with Sessions.- Keeping Control with a Content Management System.- Working with Dates.- Working with Multiple Tables and XML.