On the Developer Tutorials blog, Akash Mehta offers some suggestions of resources and methods for learning how to use regular expressions in your PHP applications.

When it comes to quickly dealing with large blocks of data, batch processing operations or screen scraping, regular expressions are often the most effective solution. There's just one problem, though - learning them can be as hard as learning a new language altogether. Here's how to get off to a flying start.

He points you first in the direction of the preg_* functions then towards a few examples (like with mod_rewrite) and tools to help you understand how things match, like the regex tested extension for firefox and the regular expression cheat sheet on ILoveJackDaniels.com.

Via Lifehacker today, there's a link to a huge list of cheat sheets on just about any topics you can think of, both web-related and not.

Included in the list are several PHP-related ones, including:

• the Ilovejackdaniels.com PHP cheat sheet
• the PCRE cheat sheet for PHP from phpguru.org
• PHP Template Designers
• the symfony project's guide to the framework admin generator

There's tons more where that came from including lots of other web-related ones for CSS, HTML, Javascript and the like. Check out this page on techtarget.com for the full listing.

With the obvious differences that come with using two different OSes, there are some that are a bit more subtle - like the values in PHP of $_SERVER between IIS and Apache. John Cox tackles this in this latest post on his blog.

I think one of the most frustrating things about web development is designing applications for multiple platforms. Whether my frustrations lie with developing applications for multiple PHP versions with multiple cache systems or designing CSS for multiple browsers, nothing is more frustrating than having applications work on multiple server software. That is why I absolutely love every cheat sheet that I can run across for these situations.

This cheatsheet lists just about every $_SERVER value I can think of and where its supported (between Apache, Apache SSL, IIS, and IIS SSL). They've also marked the ones in bold that are availible consistently across all of the setups...