Jonathan Street has posted a review of a book from Quentin Zervaas - "Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP".

If you are already comfortable taking a project from concept to a working application this book will have little for you. If you are comfortable working with PHP, able to put together standalone tools and pages, perhaps develop a wordpress plugin but have not yet created a complete site from scratch then this may be the book that helps you "step up a gear".

He mentions the application that he book helps you develop (a blogging platform) and goes through a summary of each chapter with opinions on each. He also points to a sample chapter if you'd like an idea of what the book is like.

Kae Verens has posted another book review today covering APress' "Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More" (by Kevin McArthur).

This book is absolutely jam-packed with information useful to the medium-advanced PHP coder. SPL is described over a few chapters, and a quick intro to Zend's MVC framework is provided. Of particular interest to me were the final chapters, to do with certificate-based authentication, and a chapter near the beginning describing the upcoming features of PHP6. Great book - I really enjoyed it.

The review gets into detail on some of the chapters and some of the shortfalls that Kae saw about them. Things like:

• The title says "frameworks" but only one is really discussed (Zend Framework)
• The testing/continuous development sections weren't long enough
• The "web 2.0" section was a little sparse
• The only real web service protocol talked about is SOAP.

Overall, though Kae found the book to be worthy of a place on any developer's shelf.

Tony Bibbs has posted his own review of a recently released PHP-related book from APress, "Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More" (by Kevin McArthur):

First I think it's important to cover the valuable aspects of the book as that will really drive your decision whether the book is worth a read. If you are new to object oriented programming and basic design patterns you will get a fairly good introduction of how to do both in PHP.

He points out some of his favorite parts of the book - the chapter on exceptions, chapter three covering the Standard PHP library - and some of the things he thought could be improved like the order of the parts of the book (4 should be after 1) and his disappointment in the lack of security/scalability/performance topics.

James McLean has done his own review of the APress book "Beginning PHP and Oracle":

Published in August 2007, Beginning PHP and Oracle: From Novice to Professional weighs in at a hefty 763 pages long. It's one for the bookshelf, not for the backpack thats for sure!

He goes through the sections of the book - the PHP intro, some of its "Enterprise thinking", mentions of MySQL and SQLite and, of course, the large amount of Oracle content (both in using Oracle alone and in connecting the two together).

If you're in the market for a book to perhaps learn PHP and would like to move onto advanced concepts later on, this book is worth a look. If you're an experienced PHP developer and looking for an introduction into the world of Oracle, this is the book for you.

Ken Guest has posted a review of yet another PHP-related book from APress publishing, "PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice (Second Edition)".

While being an easy read, this is a well written, serious book and is aimed squarely at enterprise-level developers and software engineers who make their living through the development and architecture of solutions developed in PHP.

He breaks down the book into the three sections its title mentions - working with objects, design patterns and a healthy dose of PEAR, phpDocumentor, PHPUnit, CVS and phing.

Kae Verens has posted a review of a PHP-related book from APress Publishing, "Object-Oriented Programming in PHP5":

In short: a very good concise introduction to OOP. I'll be keeping this on my desk for a while. The language use is strange but the code examples and the spread of topics make up for that in spades. This book has a very broad scope, but is clear in the essentials. If you're looking for an introduction to Objected Oriented Programming in PHP, I'd recommend this one.

The review gets into a bit more detail on "The Good", "The Bad" and "The Ugly" of its contents including its intro to OOP in PHP (good), the assumption that OOP is better than other programming types (bad) and the poor structure of the book (the ugly).

On freegrok.com a new review of an APress PHP-related book has been posted, a look at W. Jason Gilmore's "Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional, Third Edition".

Walking through your local bookstore will show that there is definitely no shortage of books related to PHP and MySQL. These ubiquitous technologies have been many a beginner's foray into the world of web development. Since both are free and widely supported it's a safe bet that the software you create can be used in almost any circumstance with relative ease. Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional, Third Edition is a good resource to get you started on your way.

The reviewer breaks down the chapters of the book and points out two chapters (web services and MVC with the Zend Framework) that he though were noteworthy for budding developers to look in to.

All in all W. Jason Gilmore has done an excellent job of bringing a wide ranging topics into a manageable size and retaining much of the value for later use.

Amir Saied has posted a book review of a new book from APress publishing "ProPHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More" (by Kevin McArthur.

As the title suggests this book is about advanced PHP related topics, being divided into 5 parts and 21 chapters. The title enunciates the book will cover many different aspects, but you'll get disappointed as soon as you perceive it's only about 300 pages.

He jumps right in to the contents of the book - chapters on patterns, testing, documentation, the SPL, etc. His overall impression of the book was a good one, though, despite it trying to cover such a wide range of topics in "only about 300 pages".

PHPBuilder has posted an excerpt from an Apress book today - "Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to Professional". It's from the third chapter that introduces the PHP and Ajax combination.

While the concept of Ajax contains a handy set of functionality for creating actions on the fly, if you are not making use of its ability to connect to the server, you are really just using basic JavaScript. Not that there is anything truly wrong with that, but the real power lies in joining the client-side functionality of JavaScript with the server-side processing of the PHP language using the concept of Ajax.

The article's pretty light on the code, but it does give a full example of showing and hiding dynamic content pulled from a backend PHP script (calendar information). Outside of that they just discuss general topics like "Why PHP and Ajax?" and the difference between client-side and server-side processing.

Michael Kimsal has started up a new site, Tech Book Reviews, to cover some of the most recent releases from the major technology-related book publishers out there (like APress, O'Reilly, Wrox, etc. His first review if of an APress book covering the use of a popular PHP content management system, Drupal.

Apress' recent Pro Drupal Development packs quite a lot of information in its 400+ pages. Matt Westgate and John K. VanDyk have done an admirable job of shedding light on a lot of the more complex topics surrounding Drupal.

Michael goes on to talk about some of his options on Drupal and opinions on the book. Overall, he recommends the book - but only for a certain range of people. Developers that have really gotten into the "guts" of the application will probably already know most of the topics presented.