On PHPBuilder.com today Jason Gilmore has posted a tutorial showing you how to use the PEAR HTML_Table component to quickly and easily display tabular information on your site.

Because the task [of building tables] is so commonplace, personally I prefer to treat it like stamping out a widget, and rely on a drop in solution. While several such standardized solutions are available, I generally prefer to use HTML_Table, a great PEAR package which makes tabular data presentation a breeze. In this tutorial I'll walk you through several of HTML_Table's key features, additionally showing you how to integrate CSS and jQuery to create an eye-appealing and interactive tabular layout in no-time flat.

He helps you through the install (using the PEAR installer) and starts you down the right path with some sample code creating a table based off some example data from an array. He shows how to add headers, put in some CSS for styling them and for making the rows highlight on mouseover. He finishes it with the jQuery bit that uses the tablesorter feature to dynamically allow sorting of the table based on the values in each column.