Debugging and Error Handling

Abstract

In an ideal world, this chapter would be either very short or totally unnecessary. Of course, we don’t live in an ideal world. Everyone makes mistakes. No doubt, by now you’ve learned the hard way how unforgiving PHP and MySQL can be. If you’ve been creating web pages for some time but are new to programming, this may come as a big shock. Most browsers ignore minor errors in HTML and still render your page, even if not quite the way you intended. PHP and MySQL aren’t like that; if you get one comma, semicolon, or period out of place, everything grinds to a halt.