Zend Developer Zone: Book Review - PHP Programming with PEAR
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Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review of one of Packt Publishing's latest PHP-related offerings - "PHP Programming with PEAR".    For those who have been living under a virtual rock for a while now, PEAR is the "PHP Extension and Application Repository". In a nutshell, it is a collection of classes, it's a framework, and it's a distribution system. Most importantly though, it's an excellent place to find the classes you need so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. (Ok, beginner's time is over, I promise).   PHP Programming with PEAR, written by Stephen Schmidt, Carsten Lucke, Stoyan Stefanov and Aaron Wormus, takes a look at some important PEAR classes and how you can use them.     He mentions what the book covers (which packages) and highlights some of his favorite bits, including the chapter on web services.
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The Zend Developer Zone has released part two of a series (here's part one posted back in November) looking at making forms for your website with the help of the PEAR HTML_QuickForm class.   I'll be discussing some of the package's non-standard form elements, teaching you how to combine elements into groups, showing you how to apply templates to control a form's appearance, and guiding you through the process of writing and registering your own custom validation rules.   There's plenty of sample code and screenshots to go around in this second part including examples of form auto-completion, multi-select elements and and example of its integration with Smarty.
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To prepare the way for the upcoming PEAR book from Packt Publishing correctly, Stoyan Stefanov has posted this info about the book and where to find the latest details on it.    Here's the link to publisher's page dedicated to the PHP Programming with PEAR. Guess who wrote the chapter for MDB2? ;)   It's an honour to me to be in the company of the other authors, people who have done a lot for the PEAR community    He also mentions some of the topics that the book will contain, including accessing databases with MDB2, creating and parsing XML documents, and accessing web APIs. The book is coming out in September, so keep on the lookout for it at your local bookseller soon.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review of a PHP-related offering from the APress Publishing company - Rob Richards's "Pro Pro PHP XML and Web Services".   Crack the front cover though and you'll soon discover that your new phone-book sized shield contains a lot of useful information. Let's dive into it a bit, shall we?   Cal talks about the contents of the book - all the way from the history of XML out to things like Web APIs, XML-RPC, and REST. He goes through, spotlighting some of the chapters along the way (including those on SimpleXML, syndication, and RSS/Atom formats). There's only one real complaint that Cal has about the book, one that's immediately evident to anyone that sees or holds the book in their hands - the sheer size and quantity of the material covered in the book (almost 1,000 pages).
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On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new post pointing to the second part of their look at the Manning Publishing book "PHP in Action".   If you've been anxiously awaiting part two of this series then your wait is over. Here's a short introduction to the section part of this series written by the author of the book, Dagfinn Reiersol. I had the privilege of meeting Dagfinn at phpuk last week. Below the introduction is the link I know youâve been waiting for.   The new PDF they link to focus on two different patterns - the Decorator (a wrapper class) pattern and the Null Object (an object that works like the others but does nothing behind the scenes) pattern.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:onPHP5.com: Clickable, Obfuscated Email AddressesJacob Santos' Blog: PHP BlackjackThe Bakery: RESTful Web Services With CakePHPDeveloper.com: Developing a Ajax-driven Shopping Cart with PHP and PrototypeGreg Beaver's Blog: Mac OS X ships with security hole-laden PEAR - how to upgrade immediatelyNexen.net: English Articles and a Single Distribution ResourceJob Posting: Red Ventures Seeks Several LAMP Developers (Charlotte, NC)The Bakery: Checking for duplicate records (unique record)DevShed: The Basics of Abstract Factory Classes in PHP 5NewsForge.com: A DIY calendar control in PHPDevGuide.net: Dynamic Bitmap Graphics with PHP and GDRichard Heyes' Blog: Browser DetectionInternational PHP Magazine: Poll Question: Which is the Most Important Feature of PHP 5?Builder.au: Dynamic XML document construction with the PHP DOMCommunity News: PEAR Version 1.5.0 Released
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This month's issue of php|architect has been released and includes articles such as:  PHP5: Beyond the Objects The Ultimate PHP 5 Shopping Cart PHP and Databases Error Handling with PHP 5 and PEAR
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPBuilder.com: AJAX and PHP Part 1Developer.com: Threads Versus The Singleton PatternNick Halstead's Blog: Google Gears Caching of WordPress in PHPDevShed: PHP, MySQL and the PEAR DatabaseDave Dash's Blog: Installing a PHP that can do symfony+doctrine on DreamhostChristopher Jones' Blog: Upgrade PHP with Oracle Application Server on LinuxPHP.net: PHP 5.2.3 ReleasedPro::PHP Podcast: Newscast for May 31st, 2007Secunia.com: PHP Integer Overflow Vulnerability and Security BypassPHPBuilder.com: PHP and Regular Expressions 101
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As mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone, Jaybill McCarthy has written up a Blog post about ten of the PHP myths that are common on the web and the facts that dismiss them.   I am a PHP developer. Maybe even a halfway decent one. As such, I often find myself engaged in conversations on the subject of web application development in general and PHP in particular. I am continually flustered by the myths, half-truths and outright falsehoods that technical and non-technical people alike hold about this humble programming language.   Some of the points included in his "top ten" list are things like "PHP Encourages Sloppy Code", "PHP is slow because itÃ¢ÂÂs interpreted" and "PHP apps all look the same".
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Slashdot.org has a new book review of the latest publication from O'Reilly and David Sklar - Learning PHP 5.
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Michael Kimsal points out the posting of the latest part of his "Grails for PHP developers" series to his blog site - Part Five of the series.   I've put up the latest installment in my "Grails for PHP developers".  Rather than delve too much more in to Grails head on, I'm taking this installment (and at least the next one) to delve more in to the Groovy language itself.  Groovy offers similarities to PHP, but also many differences which can trip you up if you're not careful.  I'll try to lay those out as best I can in the next couple of installments.   This new part of the series goes back and puts the spotlight on GRoovy, the base of the Groovy/Grails combo. He talks about working with variables and arrays as containers for multiple pieces of data and some possible gotchas that could come up along the way.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:WaxJelly Blog: Simple PHP script using the YouTube API (with pagination)DevShed: Uploading Files and Navigating Directories in PHPPHPit.net: PHP5 Class Basics, Part 1SpinDrop.us: Using Zend Search Lucene in a symfony appCommunity News: PHP Appalachia IRC ChannelZend Developer Zone: Work with XML Data in the Zend FrameworkColdScripts.com: Mapping Framework PopularityWaxJelly Blog: A More Complex PHP script using the YouTube API (with video details) PART 2KillerPHP Blog: PHP Interfaces: when and why you should use them instead of classes?PHP-Tools Blog: Analyzing aide (advanced intrusion detection environment) output with PHPZend Developer Zone: Pro PHP XML and Web Services Sample ChapterZend Developer Zone: Cool Image Thumbnail ClassNefarious Designs: Object-Oriented PHP Part 4: PHP5's Improved FeaturesSebastian Bergmann's Blog: Zend/PHP Conference 2006William Candillon's Blog: phpAspect presented at the EPFL
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their PHP Abstract podcast series with a focus this time on screen scraping (as recorded by Matthew Turland).   Matt has been building PHP applications since 2002. He joined the ranks of PHP-Oracle developers in 2006 when he became a programmer for METHODS Technology Solutions. He contributes to open source projects such as the Zend and Forkr frameworks. [...] We are going to veer off the beaten path today as Matthew talks to us about Screen Scraping.   You can download the mp3 directly or you can  to get this and the most recent episodes.
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On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans has posted his look at the Phrasebook series from Sams Publishing covering Javascript, MySQL, Apache, and, of course, PHP.   I get a lot of books to review. Currently the stack is about waist high and UPS hasn't been here this morning. So in an effort to trim down that stack of books, I'm going to talk about books 4 in one review.   He looks briefly at the contents for each of the books, pointing out specific areas they seemed particularly helpful in. He doesn't recommend them to someone trying to learn the language right off the mark. These are, as their title implies, just clips and handy snippets of information to help you get to where you're going. You have to know how to get on the road first, though...
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This month's edition of PHP Magazine has been released!
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No Starch Press has officially released their PHP title "Wicked Cool PHP" (Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems).  Here's a bit from the press release:  Wicked Cool PHP [...] is a different breed of PHP book. It's made specifically for the developer who wants to know how to get things done without mucking around and wasting a lot of time. This is not a weighty PHP complete reference or bible that threatens to take down your bookshelf and the rest of the bookcase. This is a book for coders to pick up and use, not wade through.   It provides the reader with "76 immediately useful PHP scripts" that do a variety of things like send/receive email notifications, do some web scraping, track users with cookies and sessions and use web services like SOAP.    You can find out more about the book on this page on the O'Reilly website. The book will officially hit the stands February 15th.
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David Coallier has an update today on the effort to get PEAR developers all over the world mapped out to a Google map to show their locations - one that's finally been launched.   Over the past weeks we have had many people asking around if it would be possible to have a place to see the pear developers around the world. Well now Christian Weiske and I (With the help of Arnaud Limbourg) have put up a nice little map system on pear.php.net. You can see it at http://pear.php.net/map/   David also links to images of some of the administration panels for the application (one, two, three) and the connection information for a web service (REST) that allows access to all of the data.