DevShed has posted a chapter from Jason Sweat's book "php|architect's Guide to PHP Design Patterns" today, focusing on the Active Record pattern.

The design patterns you've seen so far greatly improve the readability and maintainability of script internals; however, none have confronted a fundamental requirement and challenge of architecting and developing web applications: connecting to a database. This chapter and the next two chapters-Table Data Gateway and Data Mapper-provide three design patterns that better organize how your application interacts with a database.

This pattern allows you to treat database connections (abstracted, of course) the same no matter what's behind them because their interface is handled through objects. In this tutorial, they use the ADOdb libraries to accomplish this...