| Rolling Your Own |

The PHP user community never ceases to amaze me.

No fewer than six times in the past few months have I needed a custom thingammyjig for one of my projects and, after having made the decision to design and code it myself, checked Google on the off-chance that someone had already written it and found exactly what I needed in a PHP user group or code repository. Not only is this incredibly cool - like all lazy programmers, I hate reinventing the wheel - but it's also a testament to the immense popularity of the language, and to the creativity it inspires among developers on a daily basis.

This tutorial deals with one such tool, the Archive_Tar class. This is not a tool you might be familiar with, it's not even a tool that you'll use on a regular basis. However, in case you ever need a way to build a TAR archive through PHP code, it's an invaluable addition to your PHP armory. Keep reading, and let me introduce you.

How to do Everything with PHP & MySQL How to do Everything with PHP & MySQL, the best-selling book by Melonfire, explains how to take full advantage of PHP's built-in support for MySQL and link the results of database queries to Web pages. You'll get full details on PHP programming and MySQL database development, and then you'll learn to use these two cutting-edge technologies together. Easy-to-follow sample applications include a PHP online shopping cart, a MySQL order tracking system, and a PHP/MySQL news publishing system.. Read more, or grab your copy now!

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