One of the things that has made PHP so popular with web developers is its easy learning curve, along with its flexibility, particularly when it comes to building web applications that cover a huge variety of needs. This versatility becomes evident when working with XML documents, since PHP comes equipped with a decent number of built-in extensions that allow it to handle XML data in all sorts of clever ways without putting you through a painful experience.

Naturally, it’s impossible to cover all of these XML-related extensions in only one series of articles, and it’s certainly not my intention to do that. However, as you might have guessed, the objective of this set of tutorials is to teach you how to use the most relevant methods that come bundled with one of these helpful extensions, “DOM XML.” It permits you to work with XML documents in a relatively easy way using the API provided by the Document Object Model.

Therefore, if you want to learn how to put this useful XML handling library to work for you with minor hassles, I recommend you start reading this article series. Hopefully by the end of it, you’ll be armed with a solid background in using the methods provided by the DOM API, which processes XML documents without making you suffer chronic headaches.

Now that I've introduced you to the main subject of this series, it’s time to recapitulate the themes that were covered in the last article. You’ll possibly recall that in the course of the preceding tutorial, I explained how to use a few helpful methods that come bundled with the DOM XML extension, “loadHTMLFile()”, “saveHTMLFile()”, and “loadHTML()” respectively, to perform some basic operations with HTML documents, such as saving them to a destination file, reading their contents from a specified file location, and so forth.

So, are you ready to learn how to work with attributes and child nodes using the DOM XML extension? Let’s get started!