About The Author
Vikram Vaswani is the founder and CEO of Melonfire, a consulting services firm with special expertise in open-source tools and technologies. He is a passionate proponent of the open-source movement and frequently contributes articles and tutorials on open-source technologies�including Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, and Linux�to the community at large. His previous books include MySQL: The Complete Reference, How to Do Everything with PHP and MySQL, PHP Programming Solutions and PHP: A Beginners Guide.
Vikram has more than eight years' experience interacting with the MySQL RDBMS as a user, administrator, and application developer. He has deployed MySQL in a variety of different environments, including corporate intranets, high-traffic websites, and mission-critical thin client applications, and is a vocal advocate of MySQL in his role as a software consultant.
A Felix Scholar at the University of Oxford, England, Vikram combines his interest in Web application development with various other activities. When not dreaming up plans for world domination, he amuses himself by reading crime fiction, watching old movies, playing squash, blogging, and keeping an eye out for unfriendly Agents.
About The Technical Editor
Chris Cornutt has been involved in the PHP community for more than eight years. Soon after discovering the language, he started up his news site, PHPDeveloper.org, to share the latest happenings and opinions from other PHPers around the world. Chris has written for PHP publications such as php|architect and the International PHP Magazine on topics ranging from geocoding to trackbacks. He was also a coauthor of PHP String Handling, published by Wrox Press in 2003. Chris lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife and son and works for a large natural gas distributor maintaining their website and developing PHP-based applications.About The Publisher
McGraw-Hill/Osborne Media, a unit of McGraw-Hill Education, is a leading publisher of self-paced computer training materials, including user and reference guides, best-selling series on computer certification, titles on business & technology, and high-level but practical titles on networking, programming, and Web development tools. McGraw-Hill/Osborne Media is the official press of Oracle, Corel, and Intuit. For more information, visit www.osborne.com