Introduction

There are dozens of reasons why programming languages such as C++ and Perl are extremely popular and have millions of dedicated developers all over the world. Besides being powerful and offer a robust syntax, both of these languages also have several add on modules (MFC for C++ and CPAN for Perl) that can be included in applications, providing the developer with a set of reusable code that, in most cases is extremely efficient and cross platform compatible.

There have been several add-ons developed for PHP in the last couple of years, but none have reached the popularity of PEAR. PEAR is a framework and distribution for reusable PHP components. It is a set of packages (integrated classes) that have been cleverly designed to abstract most of the underlying work that is involved with several tasks including working with databases, logging, networking, XML and the file system, amongst others.

In this article we're going to take a look at PEAR from a PHP developers perspective, focusing on the PEAR::DB package specifically. We will look at the PEAR::DB package, as well as a simple example of how to use the PEAR::DB package with MySQL.

The only requirement to test the code in this article is that you have the latest version of PHP (v4.1.1) that comes with PEAR and optionally MySQL installed. Your web server can be either IIS/Apache.

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