We live in a very exciting time. Never before has education been so cheaply available to the masses (if not free). The medium, itself, has made tectonic shifts from a classroom setting, to blogs, screencasts and complete university classes, as a set of videos and interactive forums. Given these resources, there's absolutely no excuse not to dive in and learn. However, with such a wealth of resources, filtering through the options can often become overwhelming. In this article, I will outline a simple process to kick-start your education.

Among the items in their list there's things like:

• "Let the Information Flow Begin"
• "Listen and Watch"
• "Blogging"
• "Feel the Pulse"
• "Meetups and Conferences"

Each tip comes with a bit of description and some links to other resources and tools that can help you along your way.

There's been some talk about PHP 5.5.0 over the past couple of months even though it is barely on the horizon. The reason for this is that the PHP project has seen some increased levels of activity over the last two years since the dawn of PHP 5.4 and now in to the early twilight phase of PHP 5.5.0-dev. For those of you that haven't been following the internals mailing list I'm about to give you a quick test-drive and sneak-peak at PHP 5.5 using the latest 5.5.0-dev branch (which is still TBD).

Obviously, since the actual release of this version has yet to be determined, some of this may change over time. He gets into some of the major advancements and features that will be included like:

• the "finally" keyword
• list() support in foreach()
• the Password Hashing API
• generators
• a new property accessor syntax
• scalar type hints

Code samples are provided in some places to help make a bit more sense out of the example.

• "Social Authentication with Zend Framework 2" by Nicholas Calugar
• "A modern approach to object creation in JavaScript" by Marco Emrich
• Sebastian Bergmann discussing reliability in software engineering
• Scriptable sockets with ZeroMQ by Louren Naude

You can download this latest issue for free from the Web & PHP site and pick up the other previous issues while you're there!

Several people have recently asked me where you should start if you want to add some new (syntactic) feature to PHP. As I'm not aware of any existing tutorials on that matter, I'll try to illustrate the whole process in the following. At the same time this is a general introduction to the workings of the Zend Engine. So upfront: I apologize for this overly long post.

He covers the usual "life" of a PHP script, how tokenization is handled and what happens when the script is parsed, compiled and executed. Code snippets are included to show you the points to add in your own syntax item - in their case, adding an "in" operator to see if a value is in an array (a one word version of this).

Today it has been ten years since the first release of Xdebug: version 0.7.0. I would like to celebrate this tenth anniversary with a new release: Xdebug 2.2.0. Xdebug 2.2 adds support for PHP 5.4 and provides some new features.

There's five new things on his list of updates in this latest release:

• Colours on the command line
• Better support for closures in stack and function traces
• The size of arrays is now shown with the overloaded variable output
• Added the method call type to xdebug_get_function_stack
• Extra information to error printouts to tell that the error suppression operator has been ignored due to xdebug.scream

If you've found XDebug handy for testing and finding those tough to track bugs over the years, you should consider buying "support" to show Derick your appreciation (oh, and you also get a "first in" preference on your XDebug questions)!

Although purists have always sneered upon PHP for being a "patched" language; the evolution of PHP over the years, with new features added in every version, has only increased its popularity. The latest 5.4 release has followed the trend with some major feature additions. The following post describes some important changes in PHP 5.4.

His list includes: the updated array syntax, the bulit-in web server, array dereferencing, traits, upload progress tracking and various core changes to things like the short syntax for calling static methods in classes and the complete remval of magic quotes.

PHP 5.4 is here; the next major step forward since version 5.3 - keeping PHP 6 (full Unicode support) on hold for now. The latest enhancements significantly improve its elegance, while removing deprecated functionality, resulting in a dramatic optimization of the runtime (up to 20% more speed and memory usage reduction).

They hit all of the highlights:

• Traits
• Built-in CLI Web-Server
• Shorter Array Syntax
• Array Dereferencing
• $this In Anonymous Functions
• <?= is Always On
• Binary Number Representation
• Callable Typehint
• Initialized High Precision Timer

Code examples are provided where relevant.

PHP 5.4 will be stable soon. In this post I'll try to give you an overview and examples of the new PHP 5.4 features. If you want to try out PHP 5.4 (which is currently in RC3), it has to be installed first. I suggest that you try this out on a virtual machine so you don't break your current PHP version.

Improvements on the list include:

• Improved Session Extension
• Built-in webserver
• Traits
• Array dereferencing
• Method calls through arrays
• Binary notation for integers
• Instantiate a class without running constructor
• Improved JSON extension
• Improved CURL extension

And this is just a start - they detail each of the improvements and provide code where needed to illustrate the update. They also link over to the PHP.net manual (or PHP bug tracker) for more information on the new feature/change.

I've been running the PHP5.4 RC builds for the last few months, and there are some interesting changes in the upcoming PHP release. On top of all the great new features coming in PHP5.4. After updating to PHP5.4-RC4, a few things that used to not trigger errors and silently do the wrong thing, now trigger notices or warnings.

The two he mentions deal with a new warning on illegal string offsets and the other about string offsets ("Notice: String offset cast occurred"). You can find out about more changes in the PHP 5.4 series in the various Changelogs for each Release Candidate and beta release.

Recently, the voting process for PHP 5.4 open to committers and users have been closed. We now have a clear picture of what will make the release and what will be left out. Some of these features (traits, web server) were already in, while other have been just voted and will be completed before the general availability of the release.

He lists out some of the major changes that'll be coming in the 5.4 release including traits, dereferencing, the built-in HTTP server, closure type hinting and the upload progress feature previously only in an extension. The end of the post includes a poll for you to give your feedback on what you think is the most important. As of the time of this post, the array dereferencing has pulled into the lead with traits coming in second.