An introduction to PEAR with examples of using the Benchmark package.
In Picking Up Perl, Bradley Kuhn cites a saying from the Perl community which says, "Perl promotes laziness, impatience and hubris." He explains how lazy programmers don't want to write the same routines repeatedly so they design their code to be reusable as much as possible. Impatient programmers write efficient programs to do work for them and programmers with pride write clean, readable code and share it with others. The PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) brings this philosophy to PHP.
Among other things, PEAR is a collection of reusable, open source code for use in PHP applications. The code is organized as a selection of files that act as wrappers giving convenient access to various PHP functions or extend PHP in some way. The files, collectively known as a "package," are easily obtained using the PEAR Package Manager.
The PEAR Package Manager connects to a remote server, downloads and installs the desired package. The Package Manager can also be used to update or remove already installed packages to make maintenance easy.
