David Sklar is an instructor at The New School University and an independent technology consultant. He is coauthor of the book PHP Cookbook and the author of the Learning PHP. David has spoken at many conferences, including the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, the EGovOS Open Source/Open Standards Conference, and the International PHP Conference. His consulting practice focuses on interactive Internet applications, distributed systems, scalability, and security. Additionally, David is a principal of the Transparency Project, a nonprofit organization that coordinates data markup standards and builds tools that analyze publicly available political and campaign finance information. David was a founder and the chief technology officer of both Student.Com and TVGrid.Com, where he led teams of PHP developers that built multilingual data-driven web applications. He holds a degree in computer science from Yale University.