Chapter 1 gives an overview of PDO along with a few features like single interface for creating a connection, connection strings, uniform statement methods, and use of exceptions and a singe system of error codes. Chapter 2 helps to get you started with PDO, by creating sample database and then by creating a connection object. It also introduces PDOStatement classes. Chapter 3 deals with various error handling processes and their uses. Chapter 4 is about prepared statements. It deals with using prepared statements without binding values, binding a variable and a parameter to a prepared statement, and using LOBs as streams. Chapter 5 talks about handling rowsets. It covers different ways to retrieve multiple rows. Scrollable cursors, and MySQL unbuffered queries and closing the cursor along with multiple queries, and rowsets are also explained. Chapter 6 talks about advanced uses of PDO, and includes setting connection parameters, transactions, and methods of PDO and PDOStatement class. Chapter 7 gives an example where creation of the method part of MVC application is discussed. Appendix explains the object-oriented features like inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, and exception handling.