This book is for PHP developers who need to use PHP Data Objects (PDO) for data abstraction. Covering an overview of PDO, getting started, error handling, prepared statements, handling rowsets, advanced uses, and use in an MVC application, it first describes the topic, then gives step-by-step instructions for a particular example. A final appendix covers the object-oriented features of PHP 5. Readers should be familiar with PHP and aware of the basics of data abstraction. Lighter, faster, more powerful than existing data abstraction interfaces, PDO is an open-source query abstraction layer for accessing databases and manipulating returned records that is used with a database-specific PDO driver to access a particular database. It has the same role as classic database abstraction layers such as ODBC and JDBC. PDO ships with PHP 5.1, and is available as a PECL extension for PHP 5.0; PDO requires the new OO features in the core of PHP 5, and so will not run with earlier versions of PHP.