Special guest Matt Turland joins us for episode 24, and tells us how much of an asshole Chris is in real life. We also talk a lot about team development processes, including ramping up new hires, documenting processes, and workflow tools. Lots of super smart stuff that we're usually too lazy to do.

You can listen to the latest show either using the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. You can also keep up with the latest on the podcast by subscribing to their feed.

In this edition I talked with [Matthew Turland @elazar], co-author of the PHP book 'PHP Master:Write Cutting Edge Code'. He currently works as a Senior Platform Engineer for Synacor Inc. Matthew was also a former technical editor for php|architect Magazine, contributor to the Zend Framework project and has spoken at conferences like ZendCon and php|tek. On the FOSS side, Turland is the man behind the Phergie project - a PHP-based IRC bot.

His answers talk about things like:

• What kind of environment (and tools) he uses for his development
• His work on the Phergie IRC bot project
• Resources he recommends for those new to the language
• What software he recommends/appreciates
• Some of the good and bad about conferences he's attended And a recommendation to check out the PHP Mentoring project for more guidance

At 357 pages (375 including index), this book provides a thorough grounding in the key topics todays PHP developer should strive to know, and know well. The back cover ambitiously states that the book is "guaranteed to take your PHP skills to the next level". Keep reading to find out whether or not I agree.

She walks you through the contents of the book, noting that, despite her being an experienced developer, there were still things that she found new.

Despite the stated demographic, I think this book has a lot to offer novice developers. It would be a real challenge to properly digest and understand the wide range of topics covered, but an achievable and worthwhile one nonetheless. [...] If you're still undecided, my advice is buy the book - you won't regret it.

Savvy PHP web developers can now keep ahead of the game and ensure that their PHP code is safe, secure, and well-structured for the future with the latest release from SitePoint: "PHP Master: Write Cutting-edge Code" by Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik, and Matthew Turland.

The book covers a wide range of topics (somewhat replacing SitePoint's usual "anthology" type of book) including:

• An introduction to OOP
• Working with databases
• Creating and working with APIs
• Design patterns
• Security
• Automated testing

As part of a special offer, you can pick up your print+ebook bundle for the price of just the book, about $40 USD. If you'd like a sample before purchasing, they've posted three sample chapters.

It took me a while to grab myself a copy of Matthew Turland's "Guide to Web Scraping with PHP", but a few weeks ago a copy finally arrived and I had the pleasure of reading it. [...] My overall impression of the book is that it was worth the time and I'm really glad that I bought it. Matthew did a great job explaining all the tools we have at our disposal for writing web scrapers and how to use them.

He talks about the content of a few specific chapters (the HTTP protocol, client libraries you can use and how to prepare documents for parsing) and notes that there's not much bad he can think of about the book:

It is a guide, clear and straight-to-the-point, explaining what tools are there, which one to use and how for writing scrapers and that's exactly what I wanted to know.

• What was your first PHP project?
• What's the most difficult thing about running an open source project?
• What is the one mistake you see other open source projects make?

You can either listen to this latest episode via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3.

I was really hesitant to commit to reviewing the book because I tend not to review books I don't like and this subject matter just wasn't doing it for me. So with great fear and trepidation, I popped open my review copy. (PDF so I could read it on my iPad) I was ever so surprised and in a very good way.

He talks about the different parts of the book - the foreword from Ben Ramsey ("expert in all things HTTP") and the two halves of the book. The first half deals with accessing the information on remote sites and the second talks about the actual scraping of the information (parsing out the content with things like regular expressions and SimpleXML).

I know a number of my readers have been waiting for this announcement: my book, Web Scraping with PHP, is now available for sale in hard copy form! That's right, you can now finally order your very own print edition copy. [...] To those who felt forced into buying the PDF edition to get access to the content because a print edition was not available until now, you have my most sincere and profound apologies.

His web scraping book covers topics like understanding HTTP requests on a base level, working with several HTTP clients like cURL, pecl_http, Zend_Http_Client and how to analyze the remote page's information with things like SimpleXML, the DOM functions and the XMLReader extension. If the print version's not your thing, you can still get the PDF from the php|architect store too.

Matthew talks a bit about it in his latest blog entry:

What I'm announcing in this blog post has been in the works since early 2008 when I first pitched the idea. It was rejected by several major publishers who basically said the same thing: the idea was in too small of a niche or simply wasn't marketable. php|architect Press respectfully disagreed with them and decided to publish what is now a book written by me that you can purchase.

The book covers all things related to pulling content from remote pages including an understanding of HTTP codes, a look at tools you can use (including cURL, pecl_http and Zend_Http_Client) and how to use technologies like DOM, SimpleXML and regular expressions to match content.

This week we talk with Blue Parabola Alumni Matthew Turland about the awesomeness that is Phergie [an IRC bot developed in PHP].

You can listen to this latest episode in a few different ways - you can either listen via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 directly or by subscribing to the php|architect feed to get this and other great news and articles from the site.