Although we're biased, we believe that the PHP Web-scripting language is the hands-down winter in its niche-by far the easiest and most flexible server-side tool for getting great Web sites up and running in a hurry. Although millions of Web programmers worldwide could be wrong, in this particular case, they're not. MySQL is the most popular open-source database platform, and it is the first choice of many for creating database-backed PHP-driven Web sites As we write this, PHP5 isi in third beta version, and PHP has contiuned to grow in reach, adoption, and features since we wrote the first two versions of this book.