The authors of the book, for some strange reason, decided to either put together their own website with their own distribution of PHP, or were sending traffic to friends, or something along those lines. I think to take advantage of the traffic generated by book sales (just speculation). I think the argument in the book says something to the effect of "PHP doesn't come with certain extensions enabled".. and this download from
http://www.php4win.de was supposed to include all this extra stuff. However this isn't true. At
http://www.php.net, there are two downloads for PHP for Windows. One is the idiot-proof Windows installer, which installs and configures everything automagically. The other is a .zip package that includes popular extensions and a distribution of PHP which must be installed manually. Being a beginner, I suggest downloading both packages. Run the installer first, then if you need extensions you can move those from the .zip archive to the PHP folder created by the installer. I recommend moving these to C:\PHP\extensions or where ever PHP is installed. Then installing an extension only requires modifying a line or two in the php.ini file. Although I can't remember off hand if this book even made use of any extra extensions. If it does they aren't difficult to install. The php.ini file is located at C:\Windows\php.ini, or what ever drive letter Windows is installed to. Open the .ini file with a regular text editor.
The first line is the location of the extension directory:
; Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside.
extension_dir = "C:\PHP\extensions"
Add the location of the extensions directory here.
The second line is to uncomment the extension you want to use:
[code]
;Windows Extensions
;Note that MySQL and ODBC support is now built in, so no dll is needed for it.
;
;extension=php_bz2.dll
;extension=php_cpdf.dll
;extension=php_crack.dll
;extension=php_curl.dll
;extension=php_db.dll
;extension=php_dba.dll
;extension=php_dbase.dll
[snip]
There are far more than I've included here. Remove the semicolon from in front of the line referencing the .dll and whaalah. The extension is now active. You can verify this by running a phpinfo() script.
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
More often than not a new heading appears with information specific to the extension.
As far as the book, I recommend getting a hold of the new Beginning PHP, Apache, MySQL Web Development (Wrox), as Beginning PHP4 is a little outdated.
HTH!
Regards,
Rich
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The Spicy Peanut Project
http://www.spicypeanut.net
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www.php4win.de
