The Zend Developer Zone has posted the seventh episode of their ZendCon sessions (as recorded at 2007's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo).

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today's session as we listen to Eli White present "High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques".

The usual three methods are all there for enjoying this new episode: grab the mp3 directly, listen using the player on the page or you can get this and other great episodes by subscribing to their podcast feed.

Both Chris Shiflett and Eli White has posted reminders/comments about the upcoming DC PHP Conference happening November 7th through the 9th in Washington, D.C..

Eli mentions the talk he will be giving ("my stock 'High Performance' talk") and Chris points out the two talks being given by other OmniTIers - Paul Jones on framework and application benchmarking and Nate with a look at CakePHP

Registration for the conference is still open so you can still get in on this great three day event with sessions on topics like API design, MySQL security, lots of Facebook talk and where PHP fits in with today's politics.

As Eli White points out on his blog today, his (and Jonathan Eisenhamer's) book "PHP 5 in Practice" has been reviewed on Slashdot.

The book was authored by Elliott White III and Jonathan D. Eisenhamer, and put out in July 2006 by Sams Publishing (an imprint of Pearson Education). Given today's standards of hefty technical books, this particular one is relatively light, weighing in at 456 pages, which are organized into an introduction, numerous chapters, and three appendices.

The review goes on to detail some of the contents of the book and some of the different perspectives it gives to using the language itself. The book does its best to cover a wide range of topics, but mainly broken up into two parts - PHP internals and applications. Be sure and check out the full review for an even more in depth look at the rest of the book and their thoughts on the validity and usefulness of the book.

Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review for one of Sams Publishing's latest PHP-related offerings, "PHP 5 In Practice" by Elliott "Eli" White III (Senior Programmer over at digg.com.

First let me say, if you are new to PHP or programming in general, skip this book. This is not a how to or even a cookbook for simple concepts. To get the most from this book you need to have a firm grounding in programming.

He sets the tone for the rest of the interview right there, noting that most of the book is made up of little examples, helpful bits to fill a need rather than teaching you the basics (or more advanced features) of PHP as a language. Cal spotlights this kind of content by talking about the "binary tree implementation" section. Check out the rest of the review for the full story.