Continuing with our best-five-book series, today we are introducing our pick of the top 5 PHP books. Obviously, PHP has been around much longer than our other review subjects such as Android or HTML5, and there is a greater general variety of books to choose from.

Their list of top five covers a pretty good range of skillsets, but leans more towards the introductory level:

• Professional PHP6 (and yes, they mention that the title is "blatant false advertising" since PHP6 is nowhere to be found)
• Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites
• PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy
• Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice To Professional
• Head First PHP & MySQL

PHP's capabilities [string manipulation] are so strong that it can sometimes be difficult to determine the best possible approach for accomplishing a particular string-related task. In this article I highlight the ideal solutions to 10 common string manipulation tasks.

Among the methods in his list of transformations, he includes:

• Truncating Text to Produce a Summary
• Parsing a CSV File
• Converting URLs into Hyperlinks
• Converting Newline Characters to Break Tags

PHP sessions are one of the most important mechanisms in PHP because they solve a fundamental issue in web application development: keeping state on a user. [...] This is video 1 of 2 on sessions.

You'll find the video here. If you're looking for some of the other great PHP videos the site Stefan has created, check out the videos section of the site.

This simple tutorial demonstrates how to post a form using PHP and AJAX without having to refresh the page. A first step in becoming an AJAX developer.

They chose to go with the prototype Javascript library to use its included Ajax functionality. They give the complete code first then go back and explain the different parts - how it makes the request, shows the response back from the PHp script and what the PHP script actually does.

Still the practice of using objects in PHP remains a bit of a lost art - you're more likely to find an application with a bunch of functions than objects. PHP just lends itself to function-like thinking.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't take advantage of the object-oriented (OO) features of PHP. The big question is when. Deciding when to implement a bit of code as an object or as a function is the real trick of object-oriented programming (OOP) in PHP (or as I like to call it, POOP). If you get that right, you can save yourself a lot of time and hassle down the line.

Jason starts off with the differences between OOP and regular, procedural programming, explaining it with a series of reasons/times to choose OOP. Of course, code examples are a must, and a few are included, showing the structure of classes and how to create new objects from them. He explains the PHP5 functionality offered as well, including private/public/protected values and functions.