PHP Toolbox explains how to use popular PEAR modules and PHP add-ons to simplify your XML processing, database access, templating, and other common tasks. It also explains how to use a PHP code cache or optimizer, which speeds up your code without requiring any rewriting or code changes.

David Sklar is an instructor at The New School University and an independent technology consultant. He is coauthor of the book PHP Cookbook and the author of the Learning PHP. David has spoken at many conferences, including the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, the EGovOS Open Source/Open Standards Conference, and the International PHP Conference. His consulting practice focuses on interactive Internet applications, distributed systems, scalability, and security. Additionally, David is a principal of the Transparency Project, a nonprofit organization that coordinates data markup standards and builds tools that analyze publicly available political and campaign finance information. David was a founder and the chief technology officer of both Student.Com and TVGrid.Com, where he led teams of PHP developers that built multilingual data-driven web applications. He holds a degree in computer science from Yale University.

* PHP is the leading programming language for developing dynamic web applications. The simplicity of PHP, the ease of development, a large community, and the expansive repository of open source PHP libraries, make it a favorite of web designers and developers.

* Describes many useful and popular packages for PHP; Explains how to maintain your own local package repository

* Provides lots of examples of how to use little- or poorly-documented PHP packages.

1. Accessing Databases with DB
2. Accessing Databases with ADODB
3. Using HTML_QuickForm for Form Processing
4. Templating with Smarty
5. Performing Event-Based XML Parsing with XML_Parser
6. Developing Lightweight Web Services with XML_RPC
7. Developing Heavyweight Web Services with SOAP
8. Performing Easier XML Parsing with SimpleXML
9. Sending Mail
10. Working with Authentication, Users, and Passwords
11. Understanding PHP Internals
12. Profiling and Debugging with Xdebug
13. Accelerating with Code Caches