An intro to PDO

[Marked 197]

I've been really busy over the last few weeks with the semester coming to end and also with a new project which I hope to release as a live website. But don't worry, all the practice will make me better when it comes to rmxpunlimited developments :)

 

Anyway, I stumbled upon a really good and tut (and website, one of many) and I'm going to give you guys the link. This is for people writing their websites in php using a mysql database. Here's the opening paragraph:

So from the sounds of most threads in the PHP forum here, all folks know how to use is the mysql_connect family of functions when it comes to talking to a MySQL server. And that sucks. Here's why:

 

* The mysql_ library was meant only for MySQL versions earlier than 4.1. Most MySQL installations are using version 5.1. 5.5, at the time of this writing, is in preview stages.

* MySQL 4.1 was released in 2004. It's currently 2010. The mysql_ library has been obsolete for SIX YEARS.

* The mysql_ library isn't object-oriented. Including it in modern-day PHP produces very messy code that's impossibly hard to manage.

* The library is slow. Not going into specifics, much of the processing for the mysql_ library is done inside of PHP itself instead of being performed natively, which is a huge performance hit. Additionally, using mysql_ forces you to concatenate lots of strings to do what you need to do, which is another performance hit.

* The library is insecure. Cryptic functions like mysql_real_escape_string had to be written into it solely to help programmers write code that wasn't completely open to hackers, and even WITH that most sites are still at risk.

* You don't have access to a huge (huge!) number of really awesome MySQL 4.1+ features when using this antiquated library.

So this tut introduces the PDO library and shows you how to use it. A general knowledge of SQL is probably required, but the tutorial is pretty simple to follow for nearly everyone.

 

Go to Tutorial

 

Hope this helps. I really agree with the author here after using the mysql_ php functions, they really are obsolete.