Vikram Vaswani is the founder and CEO of Melonfire (http://www.melonfire.com/), a company specializing in software consultancy and content creation and syndication services. He is also the author of PHP Programming Solutions, How to do Everything with PHP and MySQL, and MySQL: The Complete Reference (all McGraw-Hill/Osborne titles) and XML and PHP (New Riders Publishing). He is also the author of numerous well-received articles on open-source technologies (including Perl, Python, XML and the very popular PHP 101 series), all written with the goal of making complex technologies accessible and understandable to novice users. He has been developing software since 1995, was first introduced to PHP in 1998, and hasn't looked back since. He is regular columnist with Zend Technologies (creators of PHP), as well as with IBM DeveloperWorks, CNET Builder.com, DevX.com and other OSS sites.