PHP HELP, PHP TUTORIALS, OBJECT-ORIENTED PHP5 PROGRAMMING

If you're working on a captcha system for your PHP-based website, you may be faced with an interesting challenge. How do you make your system too hard for spam bots to read, but not too hard for humans? This is especially worrying in the wake of bots that can harness OCR for reading captchas. This article explains how to increase the difficulty of a captcha system and test it to make sure it meets your requirements.

In this second part of a five-part series on Web Services, you will learn how to install and use MagpieRSS, a popular RSS parser. This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of the book Beginning PHP and Oracle: From Novice to Professional, written by W. Jason Gilmore and Bob Bryla (Apress; ISBN: 1590597702).

Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) is a captcha technology developed by Microsoft. This article will explain how it's different from other captcha systems, the benefits of using Asirra, and how to set it up on your PHP-based website.

If you are planning to use PHP to create and interact with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application, then you can use the PHP Excel class. It can be a little tricky to use, however, especially for beginners. This tutorial will walk you through the basics and show you how to customize it for your own Excel implementation.

If you are looking for a solution to create MS Word documents without the use of .COM objects, then this tutorial will be helpful. In it, you will learn how to build an actual PHP application that can convert a .txt file into a .doc file online.

This five-part article series will introduce you to Web Services. If you've ever wanted to incorporate them into your web sites, this is a good place to start. This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of the book Beginning PHP and Oracle: From Novice to Professional, written by W. Jason Gilmore and Bob Bryla (Apress; ISBN: 1590597702).

Welcome to the conclusion of a three-part article series that shows you how to implement the Registry design pattern in PHP. In this part, we'll take all the classes that we've created so far and put them to work together.

This is a basic tutorial on the application of PHP to get text information from a web form and write it to a text file.

In this second part of a series, I demonstrate how easy it is to define a session-based registry class based on the abstract parent created in the first tutorial. The straightforward creation process means you shouldn’t have major problems building your own registry classes or even improving the ones that you've learned so far in this series.

In this conclusion to a five-part series on strings and regular expressions in PHP, you'll learn about padding and stripping a string, trimming characters from a string, counting the characters in a string, and more. This article is excerpted from chapter nine of the book Beginning PHP and Oracle: From Novice to Professional, written by W. Jason Gilmore and Bob Bryla (Apress; ISBN: 1590597702).

In this first part of a series, I provide a basic introduction to implementing the registry design pattern in PHP. I'll define a simple hierarchy of classes comprised of an abstract registry, and a concrete implementation of it, which uses a private array to save and fetch resources across different points of an application.

PHP can be used to write text to images or even merge a source image to a target image. With this concept, it is possible to create open source ID creation software. The ID can contain a picture of a person and a name tag written in text (or even include an ID number). Keep reading to learn how this can be done.

Welcome to the final installment of a series that shows you how to build a simple MVC-based framework in PHP 5. This series walks you in a step-by-step fashion through the development of a stack of reusable components, which can be easily put to work together under a strict MVC-based layer.

In this fourth part of a five-part series on strings and regular expressions in PHP, you'll learn how to perform complex string parsing, find the last occurrence of a string, and more. This article is excerpted from chapter nine of the book Beginning PHP and Oracle: From Novice to Professional, written by W. Jason Gilmore and Bob Bryla (Apress; ISBN: 1590597702).

In this next-to-last part of the series, I finish building a MySQL-driven application that uses the functionality of the framework we've created to perform CRUD operations on a database table populated with user-related data.