Gary Hockin had been working on a book for anyone out there looking to share their experience or ideas at a tech conference but didn't end up finishing it: "Conference Speaking for Everyone". He did want to share some of the content from the book to at least help would-be speakers deal with one of the main parts of conference speaking: Submitting to a Call for Papers.

What even is this? This is a full chapter from my started-but-never-finished book called Conference Speaking for Everyone. I’m posting this finished single chapter that’s been sitting on my laptop for nearly a year to a) Get some feedback and hopefully some impetus to finish the book, and b) Put what I hope is some useful information into the hands of the people who need it.

In the example chapter he covers topics like:

• how speakers are accepted to speak at a conference
• what kind of topics you could potentially speak about
• tips for writing session abstracts/summaries

He finishes up the chapter with a mention of expenses around the speaking (if selected). The policies from conference to conference vary, so he recommends being sure you completely understand them before agreeing to speak.

In this new post to the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc shares a chapter from the recently released Jump Start PHP Environments from SitePoint publishing. You can order a copy of your own here.

This chapter will focus on the application environment. We’ll also discuss *AMP bundles such as XAMPP and why they’re a poor choice; production /development parity; and performance and debugging.

The remainder of the post is broken up into these main sections and also discusses topics like:

• the differences between development, staging and production
• the "machine pollution" that comes with the *AMP bundles
• optimization tips about databases, front-end tools and caching

If this sample chapter was useful to you, be sure to check out and order the full book from the O'Reilly store.

Joeri Timmermans has posted a tutorial to his site showing how you can test drag-and-drop functionality with a combination of the Behat BDD testing tool and the Guzzle HTTP library.

As you could see in previous posts I'm working on a large application for Intracto where they want a lot of fancy visuals and this turned into a mess when it came to write behat tests. This post will help you test position moving with drag and drop.

In his case he was working with a chapter layout that allows for the rearranging of chapters to update their order. The process is then broken up into a few different steps:

• Creating a new context feature for Behat (based on this example)
• Making a custom action that makes it easier to move the chapter entries around by just providing positions
• Calling the move in the Behat test itself

The tricky part here is that the actual test is made for the behavior but the behavior itself is making an API call to rearrange the pages. The test is making this same call and evaluating the result. It's not actually interacting with the page as you might be able to do with something like PhantomJs however.

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.