Sometimes, a simple approach is the best. That's what Michael Berman went with in this light and easy tutorial. It focuses on the creation of an "alternating rows" script with PHP.

This concept is used all over the internet. Almost every database driven website uses alternating row colors when displaying a list of records. You've seen it used, you like it, and now you want to do it yourself. But, you're not sure how to accomplish it. Well you've come to the right place. I'm going to discuss the basic idea behind achieving this and give some concrete examples demonstrating different ways to implement it.

The example code show how to alternate between two colors - white and grey - for the background of a series of DIVs. He even includes a series of tests to show which method of switching them out would be faster (while loop, for loop, etc).