Raphael Stolt's Blog: PHP in Action book review
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Raphael Stolt has posted a book review of one of Manning Publishing's PHP-related books, "PHP in Action: Modern Software Practices for PHP".   Over the last few days I got the chance to skim through the upcoming Manning release "PHP in Action: Modern Software Practices for PHP" by Dagfinn ReiersÃ¸l et al. The reviewed book is seperated into four main parts, covering lots of interesting topics in a good and fluent writing style.   Raphael outlines the book, mentioning the four parts the book is divided up into:  Basic PHP tools and concepts Developing applications via Test Driven Development Web presentation and user interfaces Object-oriented development including things like database abstraction  Raphael gives the book a positive rating and recommends it for anyone that has the basics down and is looking to extend their knowledge that much more.
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From a new PHPComplete.com entry: I have just discovered my new best friend. Addison-Wesley's Bruce Peren's Open Source Series is releasing a new book in late October, and I was sent a draft manuscript copy (basically, it's a large version of the book, though not in a finished format). I feel that I am a fairly experienced PHP programmer, and that I am capable at most tasks. However, I am still keenly aware that there is much more that I can learn about PHP. [...] And for the longest time, I was aprehensive about picking up any book simply because I didn't feel like it was going to be worth it.
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This month's edition of PHP Magazine has been released!
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Cal Evans and the Zend Developer Zone are hosting a new contest for all of the avid PHP readers out there - a giveaway for free PHP-related books.   There are a lot of good programming contests out there for PHP programmers to enter and win. Most of them require you to write a piece of code or solve a problem. There's nothing wrong with that but programmers are busy people. So I've come up with a contest for busy programmers. Give blog about PHP Abstract and you could win a free book. Not just any book though, these are programming books. (you know the ones, when you go to check out at your favorite book store they charge you by the pound.)   Entering the contest is simple - just blog about your favorite episode of PHP Abstract (DevZone's great podcast series) and get it tracked on Technorati.    Cal will scan the listings each week and pick the one he likes the best. He'll send along the book of his choice and will spring for the postage to send it along. Nice and easy - so check out their podcast series and find an episode you like the best (or just talk about it in general) and get it tracked.   Click here to subscribe to their podcast in your favorite feed reader.
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Tony Bibbs takes a look at an increasingly popular bit of functionality in PHP5, the SOAP extension, and notes that it still has a "ways to go".   In my latest round of web services work in PHP5 I was creating a PHP5 client that interacts with our Java-based ERP. The client needs to be a combination of a couple of WSDL's into one, nice, compact and powerful client. It should be noted this client will be distributed via the State of Iowa PEAR channel so it will undoubted by used by other project in our organization and throughout state government so the result needs to have a lot more fit-and-finish than would be typical.   He mentions his expectations for PHP's usage of the protocol, including the automatic generation of variables/methods/etc to help the developer use the remote application easier.
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Matthew Turland has posted some of his thoughts about a topic that's being tossed around in the programming world these days - that PHP is "on its way out".   I have to vehemently disagree with this, and not just because PHP is my language of preference.   He gives several reasons to back up the claim including the fact that large players use the language in high-profile sites as well as the recent upturn of popularity the language has seen (as people come back from the over-hyped other languages).   He mentions collaborations between PHP companies/divisions as well as components made to more efficiently run PHP applications on other web server types.
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DevShed has posted an excerpt from the book "Advanced PHP Programming" from George Schlossnagle as this new tutorial detailing the creation of standalone PHP scripts.    If you've ever been interested in making significant use of PHP outside of a web environment, this article will show you how. The first of three parts.   This chapter describes how to reuse existing code libraries to perform administrative tasks in PHP and how to write standalone and one-liner scripts. It gives a couple extremely paradigm-breaking projects that put PHP to use outside the Web environment.    In this first part, they groundwork is laid - they introduce the CLI interface PHP already has and show how to handle input/output and work with parsing the command line arguments passed in.
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Ligaya Turmelle has relayed some great news in her latest blog entry, something that the web's been needing for a long time - a new group from the W3C created specifically for enhancing the HTML standard.   Now I have to admit to being curious about what is going on - after all anything new dealing with the web affects me as PHP coder. Since the W3C is supposedly interested in input from the Web community and content developers, I decided to see who from PHP would be there. Granted it is very early for the formation of the group so it didn't really surprise me to see no one from PHP that I know or heard about in there, but I wonder if anyone from the PHP Group will become a "invited expert" somewhere down the road.   The group is looking for members to help define this next generation of markup on the web. Check out their page for some of the qualifications needed to participate and for some of the upcoming events.W3C Launches New HTML Working Group
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On LinuxJournal today, there's a new article from Marco Tabini about the power of PHP as a multi-purpose language (and not just for web pages anymore).
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In a quick note from Dynamically Typed, there's a mention of the online publication of Paul Hudson's book Practical PHP Programming.
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PHPClasses.org has reviewed a new book today - "Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP" from Wrox Publishing by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie.    This is a topic about which there is a lot to say, starting from the Google page rank algorithm, and what to do, as well what you should not do, to have your sites optimized to attract as many visitors as possible using search engine sites.   That is precisely the main topic of the book "Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP". Despite the title mentions PHP, most of the knowledge presented in this book applies to all kinds of sites, independently if they are served by PHP code or not.    Manuel notes that the "PHP part" mostly has to do with the creation of dynamic sites and working with current PHP applications (like WordPress) to make them more search engine friendly.   Overall, this is an excellent book search engine optimization - SEO. It is very complete. [...] Whether or not you are familiar with the subject, if you are looking for good a book to learn all you need to know about SEO, this may be an excellent choice.
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Michael Kimsal has come up with the start of a series to introduce PHP developers to the world of Grails (the Java framework).   The comparisons I plan to make will be mostly to PHP, cause that's what I'm most familiar with, though there may be some other comparisons from time to time.  This is a work in progress, but I'd be very interested in feedback from anyone out there interested in this aea - Grails, Groovy, PHP, why another language/platform/framework, etc.   The first two installments have been posted - part one and part two - with an introduction to what Grails is and a brief dip into some "Hello world" sort of code to give you an idea of the structure.
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Stuart Herbert has posted a new book review of a new offering from Packt Publishing - "Learning PHP Data Objects" (by Dennis Popel).    The folks at Packt Publishing sent me a copy of Dennis Popel's "Learning PHP Data Objects" to review. I'd never heard of Packt before, and was intrigued.   He includes a high-level overview of what the book contains, but notes that he couldn't get a hold of the code examples mentioned in the book (no CD and couldn't find it on their site). Overall, he found it a good book - it's a good primer to PDO in PHP, but you'll need to know SQL beforehand to work with it. He suggests that it's more of a one or two time read, though - not much in the way of a reference to come back to.
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Rob Richards has posted his own review of the Packt Publishing book "PHP Oracle Web Development" to his blog today.   Overrall I would have to say that PHP Oracle Web Development is a good book for a PHP developer needing to get up to speed quickly working with an Oracle database. [...] The only place I found the book lacking was the initial setup of the environment.   The environment they chose to go with was a Windows setup which caused him problem when he tried to compile with the oci8 extensions - libraries weren't found where they were needed. His solution? Setting his ORACLE_HOME to the right location then all was well.
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In a link from the PHP Magazine website, there's mention of a new article from ADTMag.com discussing the readiness of PHP for the enterprise.
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P&aacute;draic Brady has a suggestion for all of the PHP readers out there - two articles in the latest edition of php|architect magazine, the May 2007 edition:   The two that stick in my mind are Jim Delahunt's "Unicode and PHP: A Gentle Introduction" and Jeff Moore's "Test Pattern: Model View Controller". Both are something those seeking illumination on these topics should certainly read.   The first presents an introduction to one of the hottest topics in the PHP world - Unicoding - including a few same scripts to get you going. The second article, a look at the Model/View/Controller pattern that really gets more to what the pattern is about rather than just talking about its structure.
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Rob Allen has some great news that Manning Publishing (of the popular "* in Action" series of books) has just announced - the future release of a book for the Zend Framework, Zend Framework in Action.    Chapter 1 is available for you to download and see where we are heading with the book. [...] In order to set expectations, I should probably point out that Zend Framework in Action is a tutorial book intended to show how to use the components of the framework together within "real world" projects.    Each component is dealt with in a "what is it?", "why use it?", "how do you use it?", "let's use it in the real world" manner. It's not an advanced exposition of each component as that would take many books!    Looks like a Great job done by Rob and Nick Lo so far - check out the first chapter and see what you think.