If there are more records in a table ( say more than 100) then it will not look nice to display all the records in one page and ask the visitors to scroll down to see all the records. This will also slow the process of loading of records. So it is better to break all the collected records into different pages with a fix number of records per page ( say ten records per page) .
Paging concept
Out of say 100 records we will display first 1 to 10 records and then give a link at the end to display next 10 records. On click of this link we will display 11 to 20 records. At the same time the user may like to return to first 1 to 10 pages so we will be displaying another link saying Previous. So we can move forward or backward to navigate between pages.
We can also display links for all the ten pages so user can directly go from 2nd page to 7th page.
Now let us have one table with nearly 35 records. We will
use the student table for this and you can use code sample at the end of this
tutorial to download the MySQL dump file to create the table along with the
script.
Advance Php paging script
The above menu is further improved if you have more records. For more than 1000 records and if you have 10 records per page then you have to show 100 links at the bottom of the page. That can be further simplified in advanced script to make links in groups. Click here to download the code and check the demo of advanced php paging. But it is better to understand the basic script first.