A lot of people, especially when starting out in PHP, ask me "what blogs should I read?" There are a lot of great PHP blogs (you can see a nearly complete list of them at Planet PHP) but there are a few that I read on a regular basis and I feel are important.

His list includes PHP community members like Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Chris Hartjes, Anthony Ferrara and the PHPMaster.com site from SitePoint. Check out the full list for more great blogs.

In this edition I talked with Timothy Boronczyk who is the Managing Editor of the famous PHPmaster.com - which is a network (venture?) of the eminent SitePoint (an online media company). @zaemis is also the co-author of the book "Beginning PHP 6, Apache, MySQL 6 Web Development".

They talk about some of the usual stuff like:

• how he got started with PHP
• what kind of tools and development platform he prefers
• his recommendations to developers just getting started
• people in the PHP community he admires
• what framework he would recommend

Check out the full interview for his answers to these and more.

Episode 159 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Tim Boronczyk (@zaemis), the Managing Editor of phpmaster.com about the new features in PHP5.4, PHP's strengths and weaknesses, and the DIY approach of the PHP community.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 directory or subscribing to their feed.

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.

PHPMaster is the latest and greatest in the SitePoint family, dedicated to bringing you the highest quality in tutorials from some of the web's best PHP Developers, as well as news and information on events in the PHP Community.

Tutorials posted so far include:

• Migrate from the MySQL Extension to PDO
• Monitoring File Integrity
• From Zero to Cloud: Settings up an EC2 Sandbox - part one, part two
• Why You Should Use Bcrypt to Hash Stored Passwords