The Zend Developer Zone has posted a bit of info of special interest to those out there working with PHP and MySQL. Prentice Hall has posted a sample chapter of their "PHP and MySQL By Example" book for public consumption.

Most developers I know of either love or hate Regular Expressions, me personally, I hate them. Yes, they do the job and usually do it elegantly but it's hard to find a more arcane sub-language than regex.

Obviously, the sample chapter talks about regular expressions - specifically what they are, what functions in PHP use them, their use, and enough examples to keep you busy for a long time.

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Greg Beaver points out today that the sample chapter [pdf] of the "PEAR Installer Manifesto" has been posted by Packt Publishing.

Packt has put up a sample chapter, Chapter 5 "PEAR Channels: releasing to the world" up at http://www.packtpub.com/files/SampleChapter-The-PEAR-Installer-Manifesto.pdf. Check it out to see what you're missing if you don't already own the book.

The chapter he points to talks about setting up a channel (using Chiara_PEAR_Server) and why they're the "killer features in PEAR 1.4.x+".

You can get the full information on the book from its page on the Packt Publishing website and order it directly or from another retailer.

On CodeSnipers.com today, there's a new book review posted of the APress book "Beginning Ajax with PHP" by Lee Babin.

Although no stranger to Ajax, I received a review copy of Beginning Ajax with PHP expecting some watered down presentation of Javascript with some PHP thrown in. I was quite surprised to find a good presentation of using Ajax and PHP, easy enough for the beginner and still interesting for those who have done it for years.

Nola covers the contents of the book, generalizing the sections just to give you a brief overview of what's going on in each chapter. She also describes the end of the book as a "random splattering of interesting topics" dealing with using Ajax in different, useful situations.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review of a PHP-related offering from the APress Publishing company - Rob Richards's "Pro Pro PHP XML and Web Services".

Crack the front cover though and you'll soon discover that your new phone-book sized shield contains a lot of useful information. Let's dive into it a bit, shall we?

Cal talks about the contents of the book - all the way from the history of XML out to things like Web APIs, XML-RPC, and REST. He goes through, spotlighting some of the chapters along the way (including those on SimpleXML, syndication, and RSS/Atom formats). There's only one real complaint that Cal has about the book, one that's immediately evident to anyone that sees or holds the book in their hands - the sheer size and quantity of the material covered in the book (almost 1,000 pages).

On CodeSnipers.com there's a new book review of one of O'Reilly's PHP-related offerings, "PHP Hacks" by "Jack D. Herrington".

I had borrowed a Perl Hacks book from and friend and really liked it, it was great! It had a lot of practical things as well as some fun things. I expected the same from PHP Hacks and I was not disappointed!

She links to both the table of contents and the sample chapter to give you an idea of the feel of the book. There's two main sections in the review covering both aspects of the book - the Practical Stuff and the Fun Stuff. Of course, no book is perfect, so there is one thing she mentions that wasn't really worked into the book, but you'll need to read the review to find out what.