A PEAR is "The fleshy pome, or fruit, of a rosaceous tree (Pyrus communis), cultivated in many varieties in temperate climates." OK, so that isn't the PEAR we are talking about here. The description from the official PEAR site is "PEAR is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components."
Essentially, PEAR gives you the developer a bunch of reusable components that follow a particular coding standard and API. This allows you to create applications that are generic enough to work on a variety of platforms with little or no modifications. PEAR provides functionality for databases, authentication, filesystem operations, networking, XML, and tons of other things. Today we will concentrate on PEAR's database abstraction layer.
I am guessing that you are already somewhat familiar with PHP and its database capabilities, so I won't go into a primer course here. Let's just begin by looking at a few of the functions available to you in PEAR's database abstraction class. This is by no means a complete list of functions available from PEAR. For more information about PEAR, see the website at http://pear.php.net/
