This Book

If you haven’t already guessed, this book is all about parsing, processing, and working with

XML using a variety of scripting languages. After a brief XML refresher, I address the languages

in turn to show how each provides solutions for getting at the power of XML. Along

the way, I address some of the important protocols, such as SOAP and XML-RPC, that make

seamless data transfer possible. Throughout this book you’ll find sample scripts. You can

download the complete versions of the scripts by going to www.sybex.com and following the

link to the page for this book.

XML seems to be everywhere today and used in a myriad of ways, especially in the vital

and growing world of e-commerce. This book is designed to help you make the most of it. I

hope that you will return to these pages often as you discover more uses for XML.

This book has been a rather long time in the making. I have been using PHP for many

years now, and have grown to love it more and more for its simplistic approach to

programming, its flexibility, and its power. Of all the programming languages I have

used throughout my over 20-year career, PHP is my favorite, hands down. PHP has

grown from a small set of functions to a very large volume of functions, external interfaces,

and add-on tools. Some programmers may be overwhelmed by its apparent vastness,

but I hope to show you in this book that most of the PHP world can indeed be of

great use. In a relatively short amount of pages, you will be shown all the best areas of

the PHP development environment. By the time you get to the last page, you will have

a better understanding of how powerful that environment is in the web development

sphere.