KillerPHP Blog: Four O'Reilly Book Reviews
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Over on the KillerPHP blog today, there's four new book review postings covering a wide range of books for all skill levels and all from O'Reilly.   The books he (quickly) reviews are:  Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL PHP Hacks Programming PHP, Second Edition Learning PHP & MySQL  Overall, he enjoyed and would recommend the books, but each of them definitely has their place in a developer's learning process as well as their own unique fit as far as what the developer needs (ex. quick hacks versus general information).
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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.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest episode of the PHP Abstract podcast hosted by Cal Evans himself covering ways you can attract quality talent to your organization.   Along the way I've picked up a few truths, mainly stolen from people like Joel Spolsky. Some of these ideas can be found in an article I wrote a while ago titled "Nerd Herding", a link to which can be found in the show notes. Recently, I've had many people ask me variations of the same question, "How do I find talented programmers?" So today, I'm going to share with you some of the things I've learned.   The latest show is available for direct download or, as always, you can subscribe to their feed to get this and lots of other great shows.
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The O'Reilly PHP Devcenter has a new article posted seeking to help you out with your form handling with a listing of several tips to get started.
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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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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 posted a review of Theo Schlossnagle's book from the Developer's Library series "Scalable Internet Architectures".   I had the pleasure of meeting Theo Schlossnagle at OSCON 2006. He gave me 30 minutes to peek inside his brain and do an interview. 30 minutes just was not enough time. So when I received his latest book in the mail I was excited. Finally a chance to get more in-depth on some of the topics we covered. I've taken the time to collect my thoughts for you here so you can decide whether this book is a good one for you.   Cal talks about how he hated the book (from a reviewer's perspective, not a developer), the contents of the book, and his personal favorite section - "Distributed Databases are Easy, Just Read the Fine Print". His only critism is that the book seems to come across in a "demanding" tone (misunderstood by those that don't know Theo's style as just being matter of fact).
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Recently two books,          by Peter Woit         and         by Lee Smolin,          have been published questioning whether the enormous theoretical        effort applied to the problems of string theory has been        fruitful.  Both books have been reviewed in           several        popular        publications,          and generated substantial discussion both inside and outside of        the physics community.                        One response was published several days ago           by Briane Greene          on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times (also        here).  A          famously grouchy observer          called the editorial a long, wistful plea for patience.  But        what struck me most as I read it was its similarity to the           crackpot index          maintained by John Baez.  So, for fun, I scored it.
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The Associated Press reviews several notable boxed set releases:
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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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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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A former programmer rants about the evils of technology in this text from O'Reilly.
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Paul Jones has posted a teaser concerning his talks(s) at the upcoming php|works conference this year. One is about organizing your applications to make them easier to maintain and work better and the other is a follow up to some previous benchmarks he created comparing several of the popular PHP frameworks.   About The Benchmarking Talk - Easy one-liner: "Statistical Histories for Fun and Profit." And I do mean profit: the better your apps runs on a given stack, the more eyeballs you get on your ads (or, the more users you can handle).   He will be talking about why benchmarking your app is important, how to benchmark a framework and, the thing everyone's waiting for - his benchmark stats comparing several popular frameworks.   Paul also requests that, if possible, one developer from the teams of each of the other frameworks (besides Solar of course) could be in attendance to critique the talk and help point out issues either with the talk or in his methods.
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I'll be covering the eTech conference in San Diego in early March. It's been a few years, last time I went was just before my surgery in 2002. I'll be going as a blogger, not presenting. Many thanks to O'Reilly for approving the press pass, and I look forward to catching up with many old friends.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted an interview its editor, Cal Evans got to do with author and podcaster Paul Reinheimer.    Many of you will recognize the name Paul Reinheimer as the primary instructor for php|architect's training classes. Others will recognize him as one of the two hosts of the podcast PRO::PHP Podcast. Still others know him as the author of Professional Web APIs with PHP from Wrox Press.   I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with this young but rising star in the PHP community last year at php|works. Now, after sitting way too long on the shelf, IÃ¢ÂÂve finally had enough time to finish this interview and present it to you.    Cal and Paul talk about things like how he got into programming, why he made the move into PHP, Paul's API experiences and COMET.
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In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.   Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.   Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".