Chris Hartjes (aka the "Grumpy Programmer") has written a second book that aims to teach you even more about writing testable applications. Where his first book taught the basics of making apps testable, this new book - The Grumpy Programmer's PHPUnit Cookbook provides code examples showing how to solve some of the common problems you'll come across when testing your applications.

You know you need something better, but time just doesn't seem to be on your side. Making things "right" is costly and you need to deliver working code NOW. Tests would be great but there are real deadlines to meet. You can't stop development and churn away for hours just to add tests around what you know already works. [...] No longer would you dread the bug reports. You'd happily make changes knowing that your safety net is there. You'd try out new features guiding yourself with tests.

The book covers some more advanced topics than you might have seen in the previous book including data providers, test doubles, faking test data (or using external sources) and writing tests for APIs, databases and exceptions. If this sounds interesting to you, you can pick up your own copy of the book on his site (or try out the sample first).

In an effort to share the REST-related information he's been helping people out with over time, Joshua Thijssen has created a new resource that's less about the basics of REST and more about how to handle specific situations - restcookbook.com.

This is why I decided to setup a simple website, that pretty much tries to answer any question about REST. It’s not completed yet.. Actually, it hasn’t got many posts to begin with :), but a start has been made and we will fill it with questions and answers about REST and HTTP issues.

As of the time of this post, it only has a few articles, but they're a good start like:

• when to use PATCH
• when to send 400 or 500 codes
• handling an unsatisfied accept-language header

For those that are fans of Chris Hartjes's book The Grumpy Programmer's Guide to Building Testable Applications", there's some good news - he's working on a new book more centered around effective use of PHPUnit.

Having written a book that shows you how to write code that is testable it seemed natural to write a companion book for that, to give people a better understanding of how to use some of the testing tools. To that end, I’ve started working on “The Grumpy Programmer’s PHPUnit Cookbook” to be released in early 2013 (I’m thinking end of January / beginning of February if everything works out). The book will be a collection of tips and tricks on how to use the gold standard of PHP unit testing frameworks, the mighty PHPUnit.

At the bottom of the site for the new book there's a signup form for the email list about it. Enter your info and you'll be notified as the release date comes.

On Dzone.com there's a book review from Ivan Ilijasic covering a recently released title from Packt Publishing, the "PHP Ajax Cookbook" (by Milan Sedliak, Rajesh Jeba R. Anbiah and Roshan Bhattarai). His review gives a "one minute bottom line" about the book and its contents.

I've been in PHP development for more than 10 years and this book is really useful material. I could recommend it to beginners and experienced developers. From my point of view, there are three types of developer books - complete byte-to-byte fat books, introduction books and cookbooks. I want my cookbook to have useful and simple to use recipes. This book fulfilled my expectations.

He mentions some of the topics that the book covers including javascript libraries and frameworks (mostly jQuery) and recipes for things like form validation, dynamic content, pagination and drag and drop functionality. He also points out some coverage of testing and debugging content as well as web service "mashups" and mobile app development.

Carsten Lucke has posted about the release of the third edition of O'Reilly's "PHP5 Cookbook" ("PHP5 Kochbuch") German edition:

The book is published by O'Reilly - written by David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg, Stephan Schmidt, Ulrich Speidel, Carsten Lucke and Matthias Brusdeylins. The German PHP 5 cookbook in a new and completely revised 3rd edition with information on the new PHP 5.3. Collected knowledge of American and German PHP experts. It contains hundreds of well-approved "recipes" including explanations of the new PHP features.

Carsten and Matthias Brusdeylins reworked the third edition and revised quite a bit of it for this new release (including adding some PHP 5.3 examples). The book comes in at a hefty 879 pages and more information can be found on the O'Reilly website.

The PHP Women are trying to put together a different sort of "cookbook" than most of the community might be used to. It combines two meanings of the word and gives both PHP "recipes" and actual ones once the book is flipped.

Hi, there has been the idea/concept of a PHPWomen Cookbook being produced. Being Silly thing that I am, I [BinaryKitten] volunteered to collate and produce it. You read the book 1 way and it will all be PHP Recipes. Flip the book over and it will all be culinary recipes.

They're still in the panning stages, so they need feedback from the community as to whether the idea can get off the ground, who might want to contribute to the recipes and what it would take to get it into print and distributed. Have some ideas? let them know! (and no, you don't have to be female to participate)

Those wanting to get into Facebook development might want to check out this new site Hasin Hayder has been working on - a Facebook Cookbook (not affiliated with the O'Reilly book by the same name). He talks about it here.

So i am planning to star writing an open book (right now it is a blog, when we will have thousands or recipes we will make it a book) which will follow cookbook approach for Facebook application developers. I will highlight common problems (there are numbers of problems with no solutions in their wikis) and their solutions which I've learned in my last one and half year journey as an application developer on Facebook platform.

Several topics have already been covered including:

• facebook reveals status api - how to use it?
• how to resize facebook popup dialog box
• how to add profile tab for your facebook application
• how to successfully update all of your user’s profile offline, at once!
• publishing on your friend’s mini feed (no session key)

Symfony developers that do work offline will be happy to know that the framework's documentation is now available as a PDF:

As of today, most of the symfony documentation is available as PDF files. The PDF files are available for all major symfony versions.

They also link to the Jobeet tutorial (Propel/Doctrine), their Forms book and Cookbook.

code:diesl has posted their list of the top six books that can help you master the PHP language:

If you are new to PHP or are thinking of moving to PHP form other language then the following list of books will provide you with the required knowledge to become a seasoned PHP programmer. Of course, the list is subjective and you may have a different list of books in mind.

Their list is made up of:

• Zend PHP5 Certification
• PHP in Action
• PHP and MySQL Web Development
• PEAR
• PHP Cookbook
• SQL for MySQL Developers

Chris Hartjes has posted about a new resource that he "cannot stop recommending people to use [it] when searching for answers to their CakePHP problems" - the CakePHP Cookbook.

With a ton of help from Andy Dawson (AD7Six) the documentation for CakePHP 1.2 has moved forward immensely with the unveiling of the CakePHP Cookbook. It's a combination of manual and wiki, where people can flesh out the manual and make comments on the methods in there.

With the wiki in place, anyone can add to the communal CakePHP wisdom (or correct where others might have strayed) to make it a bigger and better resource for the whole range of CakePHP developers.