On the Laravel News site they've posted an interesting perspective that reflects on some of the speakers from this year's Laracon US (2018) sharing the books some of them have written.

We love books here at Laravel News! The Laracon US 2018 all-star lineup of speakers delivered stellar talks, and many of them have written best-selling books! We thought it would be a good idea to compile a list of books authored by Laracon speakers as well as other books mentioned during their talks.

Books mentioned include:

• Laravel Up and Running
• Clean Architecture
• Rework
• Refactoring to Collections

There are several others in the list, each with a brief summary of their contents and links to a few other related resources.

On the Cloudways blog there's a new post sharing an interview with Phil Sturgeon with some of his thoughts about API development, the PHP-FIG organization, PHP-related books and the future of the language.

Today we are super excited to have Phil Sturgeon with us for this interview. Phil is a cool dude and an experienced API dev. He has a lot of experience in creating API for different platforms. Right now, he is working at WeWork as a Platform Engineer. He has written an excellent book on creating API, “Build APIs You Won’t Hate”. He has worked with popular PHP tools and frameworks including CodeIgniter, FuelPHP, PyroCMS. Phil also contributed to PHP The Right Way and PHP-FIG.

Phil also speaks at PHP conferences and often mentors budding developers. In this Interview he talks about his development experiences, workflows and experience with API development.

In the interview Phil answers questions about:

• how he got started in PHP development
• his opinions on PHP 7.x
• preferred development workflows
• his (previous) involvement with the PHP-FIG
• his speaking and the topics he usually covers

Check out the full interview for answers to these and other questions.

Phil Sturgeon has an interesting post (with plenty of comments following it) about what he calls the "tribal framework mindset" - basically that certain technologies can provide a siloing effect on developers rather than engaging them as a part of the PHP community as a whole. One community centered around the Laravel framework sparked the post.

As much as I understand pushing the "Laravel Community", content, blogs, etc, can we stop this soloing of efforts and be a PHP community? [...] It should still have made sense. [...] Well, I thought so at least until I had a myriad of bizarre responses from people (mostly the well-known Laravel names) defending and picking issue with things I said, assuming instead of saying something logical I must have meant something moronic. That is rather offensive to me, so let's explain it for them.

He goes on to break it down into four different topics and summarizes how the "framework versus general PHP" point fits in - packages and functionality, developers and how they label themselves and books/other resources. He finishes off the post with a look at the "morals" behind it all and how, due to some of the "tribal bullshit" he's seen (even in his own CodeIgniter experience), developers are siloing into groups when really they should be a part of the community as a whole.

On NetTuts.com today there a new article with what they think is the best way to learn PHP in a list of thirteen different "assignments".

Learning something from scratch is almost always an arduous affair — you simply have no idea as to where to start, or not to start, to kick things off. I loathed learning about the idiosyncrasies of C++’s syntax when all I wanted to learn were some darn programming concepts. As I’m sure you can agree, this is a less than ideal situation. [...] Today, we’re going to figure out the best way to learn PHP.

Among their list of "assignments" are things like:

• Disregard the Naysayers
• Read a Few, Good Books
• Create Something Simple
• Try out a Lean, Lightweight Framework
• Build Something Awesome
• Get Involved and Be Up to Date

There's also some good comments with suggestions of other frameworks to learn, things to try out and a few comments that put an emphasis on learning the language before diving directly into a framework.