The latest (and greatest so far) major version of PHP was released not too long ago - PHP 5.5 - complete with several major improvements. Over on PHPMaster.com they've posted a new tutorial with explanations of these new features and some example code to show them in action.

PHP 5.5 was recently released, introducing several exciting new features to the language. In this article, we’ll go through some of the most interesting additions and discuss the benefits they provide to developers.

Their list includes the major updates:

• Generators
• Password Hashing
• Finally
• Array and String Literal Dereferencing
• Using empty() with Function Calls and Expressions
• Class Name Resolution
• Changes to foreach

Each feature comes with a little bit of sample code, showing its functionality at a minimum level. If you're interested in more information about how some of the features work, there's other tutorials around the web you can find to help - this is just a basic overview.