On his blog today Kevin Schroeder has the latest in a series of excerpts from his book "You Want to Do WHAT with PHP?" - a section of the chapter on daemons.

PHP is a language generally not suited for running daemons. That said, PHP can do it, and in certain circumstances does it sufficiently for the job. In this chapter we look at some of the things you need to know about to build a PHP-based daemon. This excerpt doesn't feature any code, but it does set the foundation for why I think PHP is fine for daemons in some circumstances.

The excerpt is mainly the first part of the chapter that just introduces the idea of daemons including some of the right and wrong uses, using the right tool for the job and how using PHP for a daemon can help with needs in a place where PHP might already be a norm.

As mentioned in his new post Padraic Brady has released the latest chapters of his Zend Framework: Surviving The Deep End book - chapters eight and nine.

Chapter 8 is a quick chapter on planning the development of a blogging application. Chapter 9 is a concerete implementation if this application's Domain Model, specifically Entries and Authors. Its purpose is to write a Data Mapper using Zend_Db_Table in the background.

The book is a free resource, but if you like it and appreciate the work Padraic has put into you, you should consider donating to the cause. There's tons of great information in there - introductory topics, boostrapping, performance optimization and the creation of a simple blogging engine.

Padraic Brady has added a new blog post today about the release of chapters four, five, six and seven (and Appendix A) of his "Zend Framework: Surviving the Deep End" book:

To celebrate the mini relaunch of the website (read on) and free HTML version of the book, I have published a bumper pack of four chapters and an additional appendix. This brings the total to seven chapters of Zend Framework goodness (and that's only Part 1 of the book) and two appendices. In terms of pages, that's 70 pages of reading material in PDF form at US Letter page size. No, the text in PDFs is not gigantic..

These new chapters cover framework installation, a "hello world" tutorial, bootstraping, error handling and setting up a local development environment with Apache virtual hosts. You can grab your (completely free) copy of the book from its own website.

For those wondering about the status of his book, "Zend Framework: Survive The Deep End", Padraic Brady has posted an update of where he's at.

Since the rumor mill has been active a while, I confirm two chapters of the book will be released this week. [...] To kick off a new spell of book updates, the next Chapter will be "A Simple Hello World Example", with an Appendix titled "Virtual Hosts On Apache 2". The following Chapter approximately one week later will be an introduction to the application to be built for most of the first half of the book.

He notes that, while normal print books usually have schedules, self-publishing is a bit more flexible. He does want to assure the readers of the book that work is actively being done and the chapters will keep coming.

Padraic Brady has released chapter one and chapter two of his "Surviving the Deep End" Zend Framework book:

As many of you know, the book is available online without charge. [...] Let me know your thoughts, and post any general comments or questions on the book or website here. I'll be adding a general end-of-page comment system to the mix during the next day or two so posting general comments here is a temporary stopgap.

The first chapter is just an introduction looking at what the book will cover and what the framework's all about. Chapter two gets a bit more in depth, looking at the architecture of the Zend Framework and details things like routing and how it implements MVC.

On the KillerPHP blog Stefan Mischook shares a sample chapter from a recent PHP-related book published by Packt, "PHP 5 CMS Framework Development":

The people at Packt Publishing just sent me a free sample chapter (in PDF format) of their latest PHP book (PHP5 CMS Framework Development) for me to pass on to you guys.

The sample chapter looks at access control in a CMS application. Stefan also includes a brief outline of the contents of the remainder of the book. Other chapters cover topics like decreasing code bloat, security, specialized handlers and localization.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a sample chapter from a new book Packt Publishing has put out called "Pro PHP, Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and more by Kevin McArthur.

So today you get a double bonus. You get to check out Pro PHP, Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and more by Kevin McArthur. You also get a great tutorial on SPL!

The sample chapter looks (obviously) at the SPL, the Standard PHP Library - functions included with PHP5 releases to accomplish some pretty cool things.

Padraic Brady has posted some of his comments on the newly included Zend_Layout and Zend_View_Enhanced components for the Zend_Framework:

These two (now much more polished!) components were both designed to solve the concerns a lot of developers were having in achieving truly complex, structured and modular Views using Zend_View.

Indeed there are months of blog postings, debates, experimental and not-so-experimental code, proposals, IRC sessions and countless emails pouring over how to accomplish the goals of these components. The end result is something I feel will serve Zend Framework users faithfully for months and years to come.

He thanks the developers (Matthew and Ralph) and notes that the inclusion of these two components is one of the largest advancements of the display layer for the Framework in a while.

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.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a sample chapter of one of the latest APress PHP-related releases, "The Definitive Guide to Symfony".

Continuing in their tradition of having their finger on the pulse of PHP, apress has recently released their latest title, The Definitive Guide to symfony. My friend, Julie Miller sent me over the first chapter to share with you.

The chapter [pdf] is the beginning of the book, the introduction to get you started on the road to using the framework.