A Kickstarter project has been started up by Alan Forbes to author a book (and full training course) to "bring the joy back" into learning PHP - The Joy of PHP Programming (e-book and course).

PHP is a great programming language. It's free, powerful, relatively easy to setup and learn, and it has extensions and frameworks available to do almost anything you could imagine. Frankly, it's just plain fun too. But if you've never programmed before or have programmed before but not with PHP and want to learn it, wouldn't it be great to find a tutorial that conveyed the sheer joy of it? That's what I want to do!

It plans to be an introductory book, starting developers from the ground up to teach them things like basic usage, project organization, working with user input and bits on frontend and backend frameworks. There's already over 150 backers for the project and just 20 days remaining so if you're interested in learning more about it or want to contribute, check out this page on Kickstarter.com.

As is mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone, Nick Belhomme has released the first few pages of the training materials he's created for using PHPUnit effectively in testing applications for free.

Today is an awesome day my dear fellow programmers. Today is the day I decide to freely distribute the first couple of pages of the PHPUnit workshop I have been giving for some time now. It is a workshop that builds a small demo application the Test Driven Development way. The reason I open this workshop course is because I strongly believe everybody should understand and use PHPUnit in their projects.

The free content is hosted off of SlideShare and covers some of the basics of testing including how to use PHPUnit and things like test doubles and handling dependencies.

Developer.com has posted the latest part in their series on using the Google Maps API. This time they focus on something a bit more complex - working with more than one point and creating complex routes between them.

This installment tackles another fascinating aspect you'll undoubtedly encounter when building location-based solutions, namely distance calculation. Whether you want to simply plot the distance separating two points on the map, or perform more complex operations involving measuring the total distance spanning a more complex route, understanding how to perform these sorts of calculations will prove invaluable time and again.

The tutorial gives you example screenshots and complete code to calculate the distance between two points and, based on plots of a few different points, how to determine the distance traveled. His example is of a running route around a park.

Haim Michael has put together a "PHP Fundamentals" class that aims to cover most of the information one might need to take the Zend Certified Engineer certification.

I am glad to announce about "PHP Fundamentals", a new course I have developed few months ago and recently completed to refine its slides and assignments. This course is available for free at www.abelski.com. This new course overviews the basic topics in PHP and reflects a practical approach for learning this language.

This post to his blog includes the PDF files for each of the sections in the course - everything from the "PHP Basics" out to "Exception Handling" and "The Standard PHP Library".

php|architect reminds you that today is the last day to take advantage of their iPod training promo offer:

There's still time to take advantage of our iPod Training Promo and get yourself up to 2 16GB iPods just in time for Christmas.

All you have to do to get in on the offer is sign up for one of their classes covering everything from an introduction to PHP, the Zend Certification and more advanced topics like PHP & Ajax development and advanced SQL and object oriented programming.

MTA (publisher of the php|architect magazine) has announced today that they have added a new training course materials/functionality to help you pass the Zend Framework Certified Engineer certification Zend offers.

We're proud to announce that we will be releasing two new products dedicated to the recently announced Zend Framework Certification. The first is a brand-new version of Vulcan, our exam simulator, built specifically for the ZFCE exam. Like our current ZCE Vulcan, the new version will provide a realistic simulation environment in which ZFCE candidates will be able to test their knowledge of the exam topics before taking the actual exam.

[...] In addition to the new release of Vulcan, we're happy to announce that we are hard at work on a new training course that will expand on our existing Zend Framework training course to provide specialized training for the ZFCE.

The new training will launch November 5th and will be open to all, including those with licenses for the previous version of Vulcan. The training course will be launched later on this fall.

According to a new press release from Zend, they've expanded their training course line to include a few more topics - migration from PHP4 to PHP5 and an in-depth look at their Zend Studio for Eclipse IDE.

These courses further expand the portfolio of Zend training courses, which include PHP from introduction to advanced levels, as well as courses about PHP Security, creation of Rich Internet Applications, and the use of major Zend products.

Here's the details:

• Migrating Your Web Applications from PHP v4 to v5 - This webinar guides you through the basics of planning a migration, as well as discussing some of the tools to make the process easier, such as unit testing and PHPDoc. The current class will be held September 9th and 11th and will cost about $300 USD.
• Zend Studio for Eclipse - The Zend Studio for Eclipse Course is designed to provide PHP programmers with a practical, in-depth knowledge of the next generation tool in the Zend Studio IDE family. The current class will start August 25th and will run through September 5th. Cost for the class is about $800 USD.

The Zend Developer Zone has pointed out a new course that's offered by Zend to help experienced programmers further their PHP education - Zend Quick Start: PHP for Experienced Programmers.

This course covers many of the same topics as both the PHP I: Foundations and PHP II: Higher Structures classes but at an accelerated rate with special emphasis on the differences between PHP and other commonly used languages.

The next session of the course starts on April 29th and will last through May 16th. There will be nine sessions during that time for two hours at a time. You can get full details, including how to reserve your spot, on the course's page on the Zend website.

David Goodwin has posted about some more training courses that they're offering via the Palepurple website.

We've scheduled some more PHP training courses up to June next year, running monthly. People who are active members of Birmingham, Wolverhampton or Redditch and Bromsgrove LUGs or PHPWM can receive a discount of £25/day

They offer their training courses to those in the West Midlands area including:

• Object Orientation for PHP Programmers
• Smarty Templating Framework
• Using Propel ORM
• Learning to Program with PHP

Developers wanting to move up in their PHP knowledge should check out the new training schedule that php|architect has posted to their site today:

The September & October 2007 schedule for our online training classes is now available from the training section of our website. php|architect offers PHP training like no other: you can take your classes directly from your home of office without having to sacrifice the experience of being in a real classroom.

They even have a list of reasons to help convince you it's the right way to go. There's currently five classes listed:

• Building Rich Internet Applications With PHP 5 and AJAX
• PHP 5 Essentials
• PHP 5 Certification Combo
• Professional PHP 5
• Web Development with Komodo IDE 4

Check out the list for times, cost, difficulty ratings and class duration for each session.