Brandon Savage has posted the next part in his "Beginner Pattern" series sharing some of the basics of PHP with his readers. In this new article he looks at the PDO functionality and how it can be used to connect to and read from a MySQL database.

PDO offers a number of enhancements and improvements over the various database libraries (e.g. mysql_*, mysqli_*, pg_*), the biggest one being consistency. Still, the high level of code that involves direct use of the various database libraries means that PDO still isn't as widely accepted as it should be. This primer will show the various uses of PDO, and outline some of the benefits.

He gives two bits of example code - one showing a transaction and the other a normal MySQL connection without any kind transaction wrapper around it as an example of "the old way" to do things.