Larry Garfield has posted a book review to his Steemit site giving his thoughts about the "Functional Programming in PHP" book from php[architect] press.

I was asked by php[architect] a while back to review "Functional Programming in PHP, 2nd Ed" by Simon Holywell. I've been sitting on this review for a while, so it's time to finally get it done.

He starts with some of the usual disclosures about receiving the book (for free), what the review is based on and that the opinions are his alone. He goes on to share some of his initial impressions of the book and whether he feels it's a good book to recommend to those wanting to start out with functional programming in PHP. He also points out that, while the book was published in 2016 the recommended PHP version even then was quite old (v5.4). He covers some of the topics that the book covers, noting that many of them, while interesting, don't add much to the overall book.

He does focus on one chapter and how, at the beginning, it showed promise but quickly moved towards using 3rd party libraries for more complex operations. He finishes the review by answering the question: "does this book make me care about functional programming in PHP?"

The PHPClasses.org site has posted a book review of Paul Jones' "Modernizing Legacy Applications" ebook today covering some of the content in the book and the reviewers own personal opinions on what was good and what could use improvement.

The current technologies we have today and the numerous improvements to the PHP programming language, makes our legacy applications operate "below today’s standards". They need to be improved or rewritten, but who would want to rewrite an application of many thousands or millions of lines of code?

That’s why you should read this book, ‘Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP’ by Paul M. Jones. It explains the nitty-gritty of how PHP applications were built over a decade ago and why they are now called legacy applications. He explains why your legacy applications are not meant to be rewritten, but optimized and improved to support today’s standards.

The reviewer goes through each chapter of the book, giving an overview of each including topics discussed and a few of the handy tips. Overall he recommends the book not only to those experienced in the industry but also those new to developing in PHP, helping to prevent bad behaviors before they start.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a new book review from editor Bruno Skvorc about the "Practical Design Patterns in PHP" book from author Brandon Savage. The review talks both about some of Bruno's impressions of the content in the book and a bit about self-publishing too.

This review of Brandon Savage’s Practical Design Patterns in PHP will include my own opinions and impressions about both the book, and the aspect of self-publishing. Many thanks to Brandon for giving me a review copy. "Design patterns are about common solutions to common problems. [...] They are concepts, not blueprints; ideas, not finished designs. [...] They add clarity to an otherwise difficult situation."

Bruno starts off with a look at the actual content of the book: its coverage of each of the patterns (17 in all), ones that he sees as missing and some of his "gripes" with the examples provided. He also talks about Brandon's choice around models being where primary functionality lives. He finishes the post talking about what he calls the "curse of knowledge" (for example, mentioning other advanced topics without knowing of the reader understands them) and the thoughts around self-publishing and some of the issues he has with it.

Giorgio Sironi has posted a quick book review of a recent publication from Packt Publishing: "PHPUnit Essentials". The author, Zdenek Machek, has written a "practical guide featuring a step-by-step approach that aims to help PHP developers who want to learn or improve their software testing skills."

The first thing that struck me about the book was the breadth of subjects: you start from mocks and command line options, to get even to Selenium usage. [...] There is a bit of what may seem outdated information in the book such as how to perform a PEAR-based installation, but it's identified as such (PEAR being deprecated and dismissed by the end of the year.) Another seemingly outdated tool is Selenium IDE, but once upgraded with a formatter for Selenium2TestCase like explained in this book it becomes usable again. This kind of advice demonstrates the real world experience of the author and makes you trust the content.

He suggest that the book is more for those just starting out on their testing journey and wanting to get up to speed quickly with a wide range of tools, not just the base PHPUnit handling.

Thomas Hunter has posted a (nice long) book review of the Packt Publishing book "CouchDB and PHP Web Development" to his site.

When I first picked up this book, I was expecting a boring, text-book approach to code examples for PHP talking with CouchDB. Boy was I wrong. What I found was a book that has you build a complete working application. And by complete, I mean you’ll add the Twitter Bootstrap framework and it will be sexy.

He mentions parts of the app you'll create - a PHP framework, 3rd party libraries, working with git/github - and goes through the sections of the book, talking about good and bad points along the way. Chapters cover things like: an introduction to NoSQL, REST/HTTP verbs, installation/config of CouchDB, using version control and deploying the app using the PHPFog PaaS hosting.

Gonzalo Ayuso has posted a book review of a Packt Publishing book "CouchDB and PHP Web Development":

Finally the new Book “CouchDB and PHP Web Development” written by Tim Juravich is ready an in my hands. It was my first experience as technical reviewer. The author contacted me by email and the editor sent me book chapters to review. Basically I gave my opinion, I test the code and I hunt for bugs. It was a great experience. Now is really cool to see the book in my hands.

Overall, he gives it a positive review (for a beginner level book) and points out a few things that can help make the reading experience better, like the "Time for Action" sections. He also was happy with the author's choice of using the Twitter Bootstrap for the interface of the sample application.

On the PHPWomen blog today there's a new book review of SitePoint's latest major PHP publication - "PHP Master" (by Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik and Matthew Turland).

At 357 pages (375 including index), this book provides a thorough grounding in the key topics todays PHP developer should strive to know, and know well. The back cover ambitiously states that the book is "guaranteed to take your PHP skills to the next level". Keep reading to find out whether or not I agree.

She walks you through the contents of the book, noting that, despite her being an experienced developer, there were still things that she found new.

Despite the stated demographic, I think this book has a lot to offer novice developers. It would be a real challenge to properly digest and understand the wide range of topics covered, but an achievable and worthwhile one nonetheless. [...] If you’re still undecided, my advice is buy the book - you won’t regret it.

Rafael Dohms has posted a review of a book from Ivo Jansch and Vito Chin - "PHP Development in the Cloud", a guide to some considerations about running PHP applications on cloud-based platforms.

Cloud computing is finally reaching a point of maturity and leaving its early "hype" years behind. Ivo and Vito do a very good job of bringing the topic into a PHP developer’s world in a very concise and objective manner, without leaving important platforms and concepts behind.

He briefly mentions the book's contents, both the technical and infrastructure issues it addresses, and gives a general opinion on the book and recommends it:

The book was a very pleasant read, not thick and not too thin. It helped me greatly as I prepared to give a presentation on Cloud Computing, allowing me to see different points of view as well as compare other technologies i had not had time or chance to try.

New from Query7.com today there's a book review of a release from Packt Publishing titled "PHP5 CMS Framework Development" covering the creation of a custom CMS system from the ground up.

PHP5 CMS Framework Development is a 322 page book that covers all aspects of creating a full featured content management system (CMS) in PHP5. The author Martin Brampton has a history of developing extensions for the Mambo and Joomla CMS projects. He became lead developer of the CMS Mambo before starting his own CMS, Aliro. The book is split up into 14 chapters. The first is an introduction to CMS and PHP5 concepts and the remaining 13 each look at a key feature of the CMS.

The review covers the contents of the book in a bit more depth, talking about a few chapters specifically and how they felt it was overall a "great learning experience". He mentions a few negatives about the book, however - the code examples are all pulled from an existing CMS (Aliro), the conventions used in them and the heavy use of singletons. He still recommends it if you're looking to write your own CMS, though. It still provides some good insight into the methods and pieces that make them up.

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new book review from Cal Evans covering a recent release from McGraw/Hill (by Vikram Vaswani, frequently posted on the ZDZ) called Zend Framework, A Beginner's Guide.

Vikram has been a long-time contributor to DevZone and is the author of our most popular article series, Zend Framework, A Beginner's Guide. [...] The language is easy to read, the examples are clear and there's even a joke or two in there that will make you groan. In short, I would recommend this book to any PHP developer with a firm grasp on object oriented programming in PHP. If you are not comfortable with OOP, this is not the book for you.

He gets "the bad" of the book out of the way first mentioning the book's tendency to jump from subject to subject and how he suggests models should be in Zend Framework applications (going with Doctrine over custom models). On the good side of things, he mentions the easy to follow writing style, the very complete code examples and the "complete" feel the book has.