n the PHP development life-cycle everyone faces common problems. Considering this, No Starch Press came with a good book named "Wicked Cool PHP: Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems" written by William Steinmetz and Brian Ward. Wicked Cool PHP is a wide collection of complete PHP scripts that solve specific problems frequently encountered by PHP coders. The book contains 12 chapters covering 76 frequently encountered problems.

He goes through each chapter, mentioning what its about and any extra tidbits it might include. There's wide range of topics covered - everything from the basics of configuring PHP out to security and user/session tracking.