PHP 5 Manual

The PHP 5 Manual is the simplified Chinese version of the official PHP documentation from the PHP 5 era, usually circulated as an e-book, CHM file, or online documentation set rather than as a teaching text written by a single author. Its content is edited and maintained jointly by members of the PHP Documentation Group, with the Chinese portion translated by a domestic team of translators; it is thus more a reference work iterating alongside the language version than a linear textbook. The book is organized by language features and extension modules: it first covers installation and configuration and the language reference (lexical structure, types, variables, constants, expressions, operators, control structures, functions, classes and objects, namespaces, and so on), then lays out built-in functions and extensions one by one, such as string and array handling, regular expressions, date and time, files and directories, networking and sockets, database access (MySQL, SQLite, PDO, etc.), XML and SimpleXML, image processing, sessions and cookies, and error and exception handling. Each function entry generally gives the syntax signature, parameter descriptions, return values, example code, and user notes—findable and copyable, which is its core value. Compared with PHP 4, PHP 5 introduced a more complete object-oriented model (abstract classes, interfaces, exceptions, magic methods) and improved database abstraction and XML support, so the manual's descriptions of these new capabilities also became an important basis for developers migrating and upgrading at the time. As a translation, its terminology and examples follow engineering usage and read less warmly than a tutorial, but it excels in comprehensive entries and detailed indexing. Note that PHP 5 reached end of life at the end of 2018, and the PHP project removed PHP 5 documentation from the main manual in 2020; this manual is suitable only as a historical reference for maintaining legacy systems.