The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a new book review from editor Bruno Skvorc about the "Practical Design Patterns in PHP" book from author Brandon Savage. The review talks both about some of Bruno's impressions of the content in the book and a bit about self-publishing too.

This review of Brandon Savage’s Practical Design Patterns in PHP will include my own opinions and impressions about both the book, and the aspect of self-publishing. Many thanks to Brandon for giving me a review copy. "Design patterns are about common solutions to common problems. [...] They are concepts, not blueprints; ideas, not finished designs. [...] They add clarity to an otherwise difficult situation."

Bruno starts off with a look at the actual content of the book: its coverage of each of the patterns (17 in all), ones that he sees as missing and some of his "gripes" with the examples provided. He also talks about Brandon's choice around models being where primary functionality lives. He finishes the post talking about what he calls the "curse of knowledge" (for example, mentioning other advanced topics without knowing of the reader understands them) and the thoughts around self-publishing and some of the issues he has with it.

That Podcast, hosted by PHP community members Beau Simensen and Dave Marshall has posted their latest episode - Episode #5, "The One Where Everyone is Going to London".

Beau and Dave discuss having been selected to Symfony Live London and how they plan to bring their families with them so everyone can hang out in person for the first time. Beau discusses his other upcoming talks including Nomad PHP EU and php[world] and Dave talks a bit about his pair programming setup. Both agree that rewriting code from another project is a great way to really understand how the thing ticks.

There's a wide variety of topics discussed in this episode including:

• SymfonyLive London 2014
• Nomad PHP: Composer: Stability and Semantic Versioning Demystified (presented by Beau)
• FoxCitiesPHP
• Links to several repositories, tools and articles discussing design patterns

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading it directly.

On NetTuts.com there's a recent post that tries to explain the "whens" and "whys" of design patterns - when using them is a good idea and why you might want to implement them as a part of your application.

There are plenty of articles that explain what design patterns are, and how to implement them; the web doesn’t need yet another one of those articles! Instead, in this article, we will more discuss the when and why, rather than the which and how. I’ll present different situations and use-cases for patterns, and will also provide short definitions to help those of you who are not so familiar with these specific patterns.

They've broken them up by topic instead of by the patterns themselves with sections like:

• Finding the Data We Need
• Reusability
• Discover-ability
• Singularity
• Controlling Different Objects

There's also a few sections that look at other patterns that really only have a handful of uses - like the Decorator, State and Composite patterns.

Chinedu Chukuigwe has submitted some details about a series of courses planned as a part of the Client Bucket Workshop series for developers aiming to increase their knowledge of PHP and related technologies.

The idea is simple. No more than twelve people in a workshop led by the best of the best programmers. All profits from the Client Bucket Workshops will go toward cancer research.

Their upcoming class is a look at design patterns in PHP and ActionScript happening January 13th and 14th at the City College of New York, CUNY. The price for the full two-day event (9am-4pm) is $495 USD or, if you'd only like, you can register for only one of the days - either the 13th or 14th and get in on only the PHP or only Actionscript for $285 USD . If you'd like any more information about the project or Client Bucket Workshops, see their main site here. You can also sign up for their email list if you'd like to be informed about future workshops.