Zend has two new tutorials this morning for those new to PHP out there - Absolute Beginners: an introduction to SimpleXML [PHP 5 only] and Absolute Beginners: Sessions and Cookies in PHP 4 and PHP 5. These are both a part of the PHP 101 series.

In the first tutorial, they start off with an introduction of where XML pasring in PHP has come from to help you gain more of a respect for the happy thing that is SimpleXML. They then move on to examples of XML, the code that parses it, and the ouput you can get from it. Once they get those basics down, they move into more advanced parsing, using indexes to refer to XML data, grabbing certain data from the XML structure with XPath, etc. They wrap it all up with a larger example of Xpath and parsing a larger XML document to get the data.

In the next tutorial (Sessions and Cookies), talks about the correct way to set, retrieve, and delete cookies and their information for your site. Since cookies can be used to store just about anything, it's important to understand how they work and what kinds of uses there are. They go into detail of the structure of a cookie, and correlate that with the data inside them, as well as setting them with PHP's setcookie() function.