On the Laravel News site there's a post announcing a course from the Laracasts.com site (a video tutorial site targeted towards Laravel) covering the use of Laravel Forge, the community's server management and deployment platform.

Learn Laravel Forge is new video course on Laracasts teaching you all things Forge, by guest instructor Marcel Pociot! The course consists of over twenty free videos walking you through configuring servers with Laravel Forge.

Topics covered in the 20+ videos include:

• creating a first Forge project
• provisioning a load balancer
• customizing PHP settings
• configuring firewalls
• using Forge recepies
• setting up SSL
• using the Forge API

Each of the videos runs anywhere from 3 minutes to about 9 minutes so they're definitely "bite sized" and easy to consume when you have a few extra minutes.

On the Laravel News site they've spotlighted a resource that can help you get the best performance out of your Laravel-based applications: Performant Laravel.

Performant Laravel is a new free video course created by Chris Fidao that covers quick performance wins you can implement right now into your Laravel apps.

The course includes 12 videos that range from three minutes up to twenty minutes, which makes them the perfect size for binge watching during your breaks.

Topics include the use of the "optimize" command, configuration caching, eager loading, MySQL indexing and object caching. The course is free but you do have to sign up to gain access.

If you've ever wanted to get into the world of Zend Expressive and haven't known where to start, Matthew Setter is offering something that might just fit the bill. He's announced a new course and book that introduces you to the framework and the essentials to get up and running quickly.

Perhaps you've not seen the news on Twitter, Facebook, or the mailing list. If so, you may not know that I'm actively working on a new book and course about Zend Expressive.

It's called: Zend Expressive Essentials.

Ever since ZendCon 2016, I've been thinking about turning my Zend Expressive talk into a book and course. I had a load of reasons both for and against. But I just couldn't shake the excitement around doing so. And have decided to do it!

His post talks about some of what the course and book will cover, providing a solid foundation for getting up to speed with Zend Expressive. The course/book is coming soon so you can subscribe for more information as updates are released.

The Laravel News site has posted a review of "Test Driven Laravel", a course from Adam Wathan walking you through the creation of a Laravel-based application from a completely Test-Driven Development approach.

I’ve been programming for close to a decade, and I’m constantly trying to find ways so to improve my skill set to be able to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of technology. The one area I’ve always wanted to improve in has been testing. [...] When Adam announced at Laracon that he was creating a course on building real-world applications with TDD, I was really excited to see where it would go.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been lucky enough to preview the course as the lessons get finished. It’s been really helpful because I’ve been working on a large, complex application, and I’ve been able to apply the things I’m learning immediately in my day-to-day work.

The review goes on to talk about some of the things they've learned already from the course including test coverage for parts of the app that work with 3rd party services. They link to this talk from Adam as an example of some of the concepts taught in the course and, of course, a link where you can purchase your own Early Access pass and start learning.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial posted giving you a crash course on the Wunderlist API and using Guzzle to connect with it. Wunderlist is a task-tracking, to-do list kind of application with support for multiple platforms and, for developers, a nice and relatively easy to use API.

Wunderlist is one of the most popular task management and list keeping applications out there. It allows you to create lists to which you can then add tasks that are easily checkable and have all sorts of functionality built into them. It has native apps for all the major OS’s and all your data syncs effectively over the cloud. It’s very nice to work with if you are trying to keep yourself organized and you can get a lot done even with the free version.

They've posted the final product in a demo repository but they still walk you through the whole process of setting up a simple application that can get, submit and update data via the API:

• Creating the Wunderlist class (a HTTP client)
• Returning data using the Wunderlist API
• Creating and updating data with the Wunderlist API

They also talk a bit more about the OAuth flow the API uses for authentication and points out that the repository also includes a bit more functionality allowing you to get a list and mark the items as complete with a little Ajax.

On NetTuts.com today they've made an announcement about a new PHP testing course they're making available for free. The course is an introduction to testing your PHP applications and is taught by Andrew Perkins.

In this course, Andrew Perkins will teach you the very basics of testing in the PHP language. Learn what is needed to test PHP applications and why testing is important. Explore the differences between regular testing, test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD). Along the way, take a look at the various frameworks that are available, to make sure your PHP websites run just as you expected. And lastly, compare and contrast the different types of tests that you can run such as unit, functional, and acceptance tests.

The training course covers a lot of the basics behind testing and several of the tools you can use along the way including PHPUnit, Codeception and Behat. It's a pretty quick overview, so don't expect too much in-depth coding and testing examples. The course with all videos included comes in at just a bit over an hour of content. You can find out more and sign up to have access to the training here.

DZone.com has posted the second part of a two-part series looking at increasing the performance of your PHP applications (part one is here). In this new post, he looks at a few topics including caching, session handling and asynchronous processing with Resque and Redis.

Ultimately, scalability is about the entire architecture, not some minor code optimizations. Often times people get this wrong and naively think they should focus on the edge cases. Solid architectural decisions like doing blocking work in the background via tasks, proactively caching expensive calls, and using a reverse proxy cache will get you much further than arguing about single quotes or double quotes.

He briefly recaps some of the "core principles" for optimizing applications and gets right into explaining the later ones on the list:

• Optimize sessions through memcached handling
• HTTP request/response caching
• Caching Doctrine result sets
• Caching the web service responses made with Guzzle
• Handling asynchronous processing with Resque and Redis

He includes code and configuration examples for each item, helping to flesh them out a bit more. He also makes a recommendation of using something like AppDynamics to monitor the performance of your application (disclaimer: he works for them).

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.