Consisting of 24 one-hour lessons, Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours is divided into five sections that guide the reader through the language from the basics to the advanced functions.

The first section of the book teaches the fundamentals of PHP. And then, building upon what has been taught in the first section, sections two through four shows the reader how to apply that knowledge in order to interact with the user by creating and managing forms, cookies and authentication. It also teaches how to access databases and how to integrate system components, e-mail, LDAP, network sockets and much more.