Giorgio Sironi has posted a new review of one of the recent PHP-related books from Packt Publishing - Expert PHP 5 Tools - written by Dirk Merkel. The book covers some of the tools that developers can use to get their jobs done better and faster.

The book I'm reviewing today is Expert PHP 5 Tools, which in the last month has gained a lot of momentum in the blogosphere. [...] I'm not severe on this type of readings, because I always have to remember that a book is a starting point: you have to actually use the practices described here and gain experience to be effective. Thus, if you are a project manager which wants to really empower his developers instead of limiting them, check out this book.

He mentions some of the topics covered in this "starting point" book like unit testing, version control, open source frameworks, deployment technologies and an interesting addition, UML modeling. The only content he didn't particularly care for was the emphasis put on using IDEs over something simpler if there's not a need for something quite that heavy.