The SitePoint PHP blog has a new article posted showing you how to get started with Underscore, a PHP library ported over from Javascript's popular Underscore.js library with many of the same methods intact.

If you’ve ever used the Backbone framework for JavaScript, you’ll already be familiar with Underscore. Indeed, it’s become incredibly useful for JavaScript developers in general. But did you know that it’s been ported to PHP? [...] Underscore describes itself as a “utility belt library for JavaScript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in JavaScript objects. It’s the tie to go along with jQuery’s tux, and Backbone.js’s suspenders.”

He starts by showing you how to get it installed and some of the basic syntax of the methods it defines (basically replace the period with the double-colon) for both the procedural and OOP handling. He shows examples of a few of the more handy methods it provides including:

• Each
• Pluck
• Minimum and Maximum
• Filter and Reject
• sortBy
• groupBy

...and many more. There's also a bit of talk about templating and extending the library via "mixins".