MySQL claims to be the world's most popular open source database, and with good reason. It is free, runs on a wide variety of platforms, is relatively simple, easy to configure and performs well even under significant load. By comparison to some other popular database management systems, configuring it is quite simple, but there are still a sufficiently wide variety of security-relevant configuration issues to make securing it a challenge.

This Free PDF Ebooks is a brief outline of common attacks on MySQL and the steps that a MySQL administrator can take to defend against them.

MySQL AB actively maintain several versions of their database software, and determining which version to install can be somewhat confusing. From a security point of view the decision is further complicated by the fact that additional security features are often available in 'alpha' versions but not in the current 'production' version.

In this article, you learn how to use PHP’s more advanced object-oriented capabilities. When you finish reading this chapter, you will have learned:

Overloading capabilities that can be controlled from PHP code
In PHP 5, extensions written in C can overload almost every aspect of the object syntax. It also allows PHP code to overload a limited subset that is most often needed. This section covers the overloading abilities that you can control from your PHP code.
PHP allows overloading of property access and method calls by implementing
special proxy methods that are invoked if the relevant property or method
doesn’t exist. This gives you a lot of flexibility in intercepting these actions and defining your own functionality.

As a programming language, PHP has many advantages, such as ease of use, quick development time, and very high performance. The question that really matters is “can you use PHP to write object-oriented applications?”
With PHP 5’s brand new object model, PHP 5 has become a language that leverages the power and flexibility of object-oriented programming in a number of useful ways. Like most object-oriented languages, PHP 5 allows the developer to take advantage of interfaces, abstract classes, private/public/protected access modifiers, static members and methods, exception handling, and other features that were not available in prior releases of PHP. Perhaps the most important thing to note about the object-oriented improvements of PHP 5 is that objects are now referenced by handle and not by value.
Object-oriented PHP thus gives us the ability to build more scalable applications, make effective reuse of code, and handle exceptions elegantly. Welcome news to many a PHP-and-Java developer is that PHP can integrate with Java—you can activate Java objects in your PHP code and then use those objects as if they were regular PHP objects.

This guide is an attempt to provide more or less complete information on accessing MySQL API functionality from PHP web scripting language.

Today PHP is one of the most usable web languages used for server-side scripting. The usability of PHP came obvious since version 3 was released, and version 4 introduced another amount of useful features. A number of companies already moved from Perl/CGI to PHP, and more still to come.

PHP engine is typically used with Apache server under POSIX-compatible operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, other UNIX clones, etc.). However PHP itself isn’t dependent on a particular web-server or operating system.

In the whole guide, PHP 4.0.6 or later version is assumed, however most of information will also be applicable to earlier versions of PHP. All OS-specific stuff will be marked as such.

PHP functionality, including installation process, is about the same for all POSIX-compatible operating systems, while it slightly differs for Microsoft Windows, and thus two MySQL-API installation sections are included to this guide.

This article is intended for the PHP programmer interested in avoiding some of the most common mistakes when applying PHP. The reader is expected to at least be familiar with PHP syntax, but should have a working knowledge of PHP functionality as well.

One of PHP's greatest strengths happens to be one of its greatest weaknesses as well: PHP is easy to learn. Many people are attracted to the language because of this, not realizing that it's a lot tougher to learn how to do it right.
There just hasn't been enough emphasis on good programming practice. Inexperienced coders are being asked to create and distribute complex web applications. Mistakes that an experienced programmer would avoid are all too common, such as the improper use of the printf() function or the misapplication of PHP's semantics.
In this three part article series, I present a list of 21 mistakes that I believe are frequently made and ranging in severity from non-critical down to those that can break the farm. I offer solutions, suggestions and/or comments on how to solve and prevent these errors, in addition to other tricks of the trade that I have gained over the years.