The technique of splitting up a information into multiple pages is known as pagination. For web pages it normally means taking a resultset from a database query and only showing a specific number of records per page. There are many variations of how to do this no matter what technology (PHP, ASP, JSP, Coldfusion) you use.
In my attempt to learn PHP I thought I would create a simple web site that does some basic database interaction (select, insert, update and delete), sorting and paging, keyword search, and use some of the new PHP 5 features such as OOP, exception handling and the new mysqli extension for MySQL 4.1 and above.
Sean Hull wrote two great articles describing the differences between the latest versions of PHP (ver 5) and ASP.NET (ver 2.0). The first article gave a good introduction to both technologies, while the second article went into more detail of advanced features such as OOP in PHP and the .NET framework in ASP.NET.
As I mentioned in a previous post, in order to develop PHP web pages on your local PC you need a web server installed. You basically have two choices: Use a software package to install everything you need or you can install them seperately to get the greatest control over your development environment. For Windows users if you do not have the Professional edition that includes Internet Information Server (IIS) you need to down the Apache web server instead.
Configuring either IIS or Apache can be tricky and somewhat confusing so I did the research for you and give you detailed steps on how to configure either IIS or Apache to work with PHP.
Once you learn the basics of PHP, you will want to know how to interact with a database and update its data from a web page. MySQL is the most obvious and recommended choice using PHP and is fairly easy to setup.
You can use phpMyAdmin to easiy setup your MySQL database, tables and perform any necessary SQL statements.
In order to setup a proper development environment for your home PC to create and test PHP and MySQL web pages you will need at least three components:
Only recently have I started to learn PHP and am starting to realize what all the fuss is about. PHP has been around for 10 years and has gained steady increasing popularity.
