In a new post to his blog, Leonid Mamchenkov has linked to a resource that aims to help developers refactor their code to use best practices and design patterns: Refactoring.Guru.

Refactoring.Guru is a great resource for learning about refactoring best practices and design patterns. A lot of the website’s content is also available as Dive into Design Patterns ebook.

Today I came across this GitHub repository, which makes this resource even better specifically for PHP developers. Yup, that’s right, the GitHub repository features all code examples written in PHP 7.3, making it super easy to jump into coding.

The repository includes a Composer configuration to pull in some analysis tools and includes examples of about twenty different design patterns in use.

Gary Hockin had been working on a book for anyone out there looking to share their experience or ideas at a tech conference but didn't end up finishing it: "Conference Speaking for Everyone". He did want to share some of the content from the book to at least help would-be speakers deal with one of the main parts of conference speaking: Submitting to a Call for Papers.

What even is this? This is a full chapter from my started-but-never-finished book called Conference Speaking for Everyone. I’m posting this finished single chapter that’s been sitting on my laptop for nearly a year to a) Get some feedback and hopefully some impetus to finish the book, and b) Put what I hope is some useful information into the hands of the people who need it.

In the example chapter he covers topics like:

• how speakers are accepted to speak at a conference
• what kind of topics you could potentially speak about
• tips for writing session abstracts/summaries

He finishes up the chapter with a mention of expenses around the speaking (if selected). The policies from conference to conference vary, so he recommends being sure you completely understand them before agreeing to speak.

Giorgio Sironi has posted a review of a book to his site that shares fifty quick ideas to improve your tests that can help with things like run time, ease of maintenance and following best testing practices.

Fifty quick ideas to improve your tests is, well, a series of fifty quick ideas that you can implement on some of your automated test suites to improve their value or lower their creation or maintenance costs.

These ideas are pattern-like in which they are mostly self-contained and often independent from each other. They are distilled from real world scenarios that the authors (David Evans, Tom Roden and Gojko Adzic) have encountered in their work.

He's included a few quotes from the book he found particularly interesting including mentions of:

• a pyramid of software quality levels
• misunderstanding that testing can somehow be completely replaced by a set of carefully chosen examples
• difficult testing is a symptom, not a problem
• the problem with time-based "sleeping" in tests

You can find the book itself over on Leanpub and can pick up your own copy for around $10 USD.

In this new post to the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc shares a chapter from the recently released Jump Start PHP Environments from SitePoint publishing. You can order a copy of your own here.

This chapter will focus on the application environment. We’ll also discuss *AMP bundles such as XAMPP and why they’re a poor choice; production /development parity; and performance and debugging.

The remainder of the post is broken up into these main sections and also discusses topics like:

• the differences between development, staging and production
• the "machine pollution" that comes with the *AMP bundles
• optimization tips about databases, front-end tools and caching

If this sample chapter was useful to you, be sure to check out and order the full book from the O'Reilly store.

As Davey Shafik mentions in this post to his site, O'Reilly has just released a "mini-eBook" he's written up to help you migrate your current codebase up to PHP 7 compatibility.

Yesterday, O’Reilly published my report on Upgrading to PHP 7. This 80-page mini-eBook is available free (and DRM free) in ePub, Mobi, and PDF formats.

Grab it today or read more details here.

The book guides you through the updates and features that come along with PHP 7 including: "deprecated features, Unicode enhancements, changes in Object-Oriented programming, and other enhancements." You'll get more details on what to change to bring your code up to the level of PHP 7 and remove deprecated features and what to replace them with. The book is free so there's no reason not to pick up a copy and find out what the PHP 7 revolution is all about.

Based on his popular conference session "It was like that when I got there", Paul Jones has announced the release of an ebook covering the migration of legacy applications to a more recent, well-structured system. The book, "Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP", is still in the works, though.

My upcoming book, “Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP”, [shows how to improve your application with small changes]. Using my talk “It Was Like That When I Got Here” as a starting point, I condense 15 years of fixing PHP codebases into a collection of specific steps to complete in order. As you apply these small fixes, each one building on the last, you will be able to restructure your codebase from a spaghetti mess to a testable, organized, modernized application, free of globals and mixed concerns.

If the premise sounds interesting, be sure to sign up to be notified of updates as they happen. There's also some freebies that'll come along with the subscription including a pre-publication chapter.

Rob Aley pointed me towards a new ebook he's created that wants to help you understand what kinds of things PHP can do "beyond the web" and the usual web-based applications - PHP Beyond the Web.

Leverage your existing web based PHP skills to write all types of software. CLI scripts, desktop software, network servers and more - this book will give you the tools, techniques and background necessary to write just about any type of software you can think of, using the PHP you know.

The book covers topics like interactive shell scripts, system daemons and desktop software. It also looks at some more general development topics like licensing, deployment and system interactions. If this sounds interesting and you want a sample of the content, check out the table of contents or the sample chapter.

Cal Evans has a new post to his site today about a book he's published covering a topic not really focused on in the PHP world - command-line usage. The book, "Signaling PHP" covers the use of the process control extension to handle command-line signals.

Most of the PHP I write these days is CLI scripts. I really wanted to be able to trap signals in some of my scripts. I struggled with this for a while; I even spent an entire weekend googling and reading only to find out that most of the information out there was either wrong, confusing, or incomplete. I decided that once I figured it out, I was going to put everything I learned together in one place to help others that were struggling with this topic as well.

The eBook is available for purchase and download now at a suggested price of only $5 USD. If you've been looking for a quick, concise guide to using process control in PHP, you should check it out.

In a new post to his site Eric Ritz shares a book review of Sam Hennessey's "PHP Array Filtering" ebook in his "Use Case" series.

This week I read “PHP Array Filtering” by Sam Hennessy. My intent was to read another book but in the middle of the week Mr. Hennessy asked me to check out his book. I don’t know the author and we’d never spoken before, so I was surprised. I find it humbling when anyone asks my thoughts on anything programming related, so because of that - and since the book is a short read anyways - I decided to write about it today and write about my previous choice next Sunday.

Eric walks through some of the contents of the book noting that, because of the vast amount of array support in PHP, is probably a viable topic on its own for an ebook. He goes through the sections of the book, picking out specifically picking out the filtering section (main topic of the book and all). He also points out a few problems with the book, two things that were suggestions, not really errors. He recommends it for what it is, though - a reference book for those working with arrays.

WordPress developers (or just site admins) will be happy to know that a new book is in the works (by Alison) about securing, monitoring and generally "unhacking" WordPress.

I'm at the very early stages of writing a book about how to secure, monitor and un-hack WordPress. This book will be the culmination of everything I know about keeping WordPress hardened against attacks, how to keep an eye on your install so that you’re the first to know if something has happened, and how to handle the situation if you bought the book too late and got pwned anyway.

The book will be released as an e-book and she explains some of the specifics of that in the post - cost, pre-ordering, why an e-book and her qualifications to write and release the book as a good thing to follow.