In this first series of articles, Alejandro Gervasio is inviting you to flirt with Networking functions in PHP5. The article is built around a QueryProcessor class where he explore in this first series some common networking tasks, such as converting host names to the corresponding IP addresses and vice versa, listing Internet service names and TCP port numbers.
For many PHP developers, network programming seems to be rather elusive terrain. It becomes even more difficult to navigate when dealing with advanced topics, such as working with low-level sockets or dealing with the numerous and intimidating features of a specific network protocol.
The networking query application that I plan to build will be encapsulated within a single PHP 5 class, but you can easily modify its complete source code in order to work with PHP 4. As I said before, this application should be considered a practical introduction to using many PHP built-in functions included in the corresponding PHP network library, so if you want to learn how to use these functions, this series might help you to start quickly including them in your own applications.
