I recently read Matt Zandstra's PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice and thought I'd say a few good words about it for those who haven't been recommended yet. A lot of good PHP5 books have come out recently, eg something like PHP 5 Power Programming is an excellent resource for the finer points of charset issues, utf8 in PHP, timezone gotchas. But it's quite unusual in PHP circles for a book to come out that gives overall sound advice on application design.

I found Matt, who comes from a Java background, really hit the nail on the head, this book is an enjoyable read. While the first few chapters make allowances for readers who don't have a lot of exposure to OOP, the rest is quite a stimulating read, helped along in no small part by Matt's excellent unambiguous writing style.

He also mentions other topics that the book covers, things like the Composite pattern, Phing, PEAR, and the Reflection API.]]> Mon, 09 Jan 2006 07:05:39 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4622 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4622 Christian Stocker has a quick new post with a solution for those Mac users out there that would like to use the iconv extension with fink.

If you want to get the iconv extension properly running with PHP 5 and fink on OS X, you need the following configure option

--with-iconv=/sw/

and then it should work.

Hope that helps others, too.

And, apparently, it does - given the one comment below it so far that has a positive response... ]]> Fri, 06 Jan 2006 07:23:47 -0600