The O'Reilly Network has a new article this morning - it's an excerpt from the book Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL. PHP Session Management With Cookies gives you some pretty good fundamentals on the idea of the "stateless nature" that browsers find themselves in these days. Cookies and sessions have become as common as normal HTML pages were years ago (and still are to some extent). They give you a good idea of what's really going on behind the scenes when you post a cookie or when someone is using your site with sessions. They give you a bit of code for both the sessions and the cookies - but it's really just simple stuff. This article is better suited for those out there just starting to struggle with cookies/sessions in PHP and understanding how they work with the remote server.

I know, I know - this topics seems hounded to death lately, but this article over on DevArticles gives you a nice overview of Regular Expressions. If you don't know them already and find yourself using several string functions over and over in a group just to pull a small chunk out of a string - you really should look into these. There's quite a bit of power in these little strings - enabling you to pull out some very nice info from a string, doing the same thing that would have taken 5 or 6 lines of string functions...