Ralph Schindler has started up a new series of posts to his blog with this first article looking one of the fundamentals of PHP - statics.

Static class members (from here on called simply, “statics”) in PHP conjure both the best and worst in developers for a variety of reasons. In part 1 of this series of articles on statics, we’ll explore some background to get a better understanding of statics in PHP.

He covers some of the places that the idea of "static" came from and how its used in a few other languages (including ones PHP borrowed some of its ideas from). He uses a few analogies to illustrate what statics are and even includes some illustrations of how the static scope of PHP compares with other languages (like Java and .NET).