What I want to do is access MySQL from PHP5 using the PEAR DB library. Pretty basic stuff, but new to me.

I'm reading Programming PHP by Rasmus Lerdof, Kevin Tatroe, and Peter MacIntyre. This is one of those classic books; Lerdof is the creator of PHP.

So what I've done is basically just run one of the examples in this book. This is not as trivial as it sounds. First of all, I want to understand what the example does. Second, what's described in the book isn't exactly correct, or rather it was at one time, but not now. I have the second edition, April 2006. My PHP is 5.1.4, which is now already old; 5.2 is out.

The tasks discussed here are creating a database using mysql, ensuring that PHP has access to the PEAR DB library, and running a simple application that accesses this data through the Internet using the PEAR DB library. My OS is Ubuntu Dapper.

The file below (written in OpenOffice 2.0) describes what I did.