A while back Alan Forbes started a Kickstarter project to write a PHP book, "The Joy of PHP". This book was targeted at those that wanted to learn PHP and "have some fun along the way". The book has been finished and, in a special promotion, is being offered free of charge through Amazon and for the next five days.

The book "The Joy of PHP" by Alan Forbes now available as a Kindle book on Amazon.com. Starting today (or tomorrow, depending on Amazon) and lasting only 5 days the book will be absolutely free. The only "catch" is that the author is asking for reviews. In other words, once you've taken a look a the book please go back to the book listing on Amazon and give it a star rating from 1 to 5 to help the author build momentum for the book.

You can find out more about the book on its website and, if you don't want the Kindle version, pick up a copy of the PDF version for just $12 USD.

UPDATE: the free offer for this book has been extended and is available for no cost for a limited time!

The latest issue of the Web & PHP Magazine has been published - Issue #10. This issue can be downloaded for free and has articles about:

• Building an Identity Extraction Engine in PHP (Jonathan LeBlanc)
• 5 Deadly Programming Sins (Michael Stowe)
• Physical Security Fail (Arne Blankerts)
• Database Indexing (Cory Isaacson)

You can also download previous issues of the magazine for free after registering or logging in to your account.

On the Symfony blog Fabien Potencier has posted a quick note about the Symfony Live Paris 2012 session videos being available online for free.

During SymfonyLive Paris 2012, we recorded all the sessions that were delivered in the two main rooms. That's a total of more than 15 hours of Symfony and PHP goodness. We promised a free access to all attendees, but we have decided to provide all the videos for free and for everyone. So, if you were not able to join us in Paris, this is a unique opportunity to watch all the great sessions we had.

Sessions presented at this year's event included:

• Realtime Web Apps with WebSockets
• Using MongoDB responsibly
• Advanced Service Container Utilization
• Advanced Silex
• Decoupling Content Management with Create and PHPCR
• ORMs don't kill your database, developers do!

The latest issue of the Web and PHP Magazine has just been released - Issue 5. In this issue you'll find:

• #Trending: What's hot and what's not in the PHP and web dev community at the moment
• An interview with Zeev Suraski
• A Look Ahead to ZendCon 2012
• "5 Reasons To Maximize Your Use Of PHP's Built-In Feature"
• Stefan Priebsch On Soccer.

As always, you can download the issue for free to get the PDF version or you can download the iPad application and get the latest issues there.

The latest issue of the "Web and PHP Magazine" has been published - Issue #3 with articles including:

• An interview with Razi Sharir, CEO of Xeround, on DBaaS
• A preview of IPC Spring 2012
• Sebastian Bergmann (thePHP.cc) on hotels
• 'An Overview Of PHP QA Tools' by Luis Oblonczyk (Softnex)
• 'An Introduction To Traits' by Michael Stowe (CaringBridge)

You can download this issue free (registration required) as a PDF. Additionally, if you'd like to see the first two issues, you can check out their archives to download those as well.

The latest issue (second) of the "Web and PHP Magazine" has been released. Articles in this issue include:

• An interview with Colin Hayhurst, co-founder of StackBlaze, on running a PHP startup
• A preview of PHP Summit 2012 UK
• Stefan Priebsch (thePHP.cc) on how to see the bigger picture (application architecture)
• 'PaaS: The Cloud On-Ramp For PHP Developers' (by Lucas Carlson of AppFog)
• 'Cryptography In PHP' (by Enrico Zimuel of Zend)

Once again, you can download this issue for free to enjoy!

php|architect has announced a new contest they'll be hosting (a scavenger hunt, really) and are giving away a ticket to this year's php|tek conference happening in May in Chicago.

Ok PHP fans, we don't do this often, but once a year we do give away a ticket to php|tek to one lucky programmer. This year, however, you are going to have to work for it. Starting Friday, April 13th, 2012, those of us who work at php|architect will tweet clues, and you are going on a web scavenger hunt. That's right, dig up other people's websites, trash their JavaScript and generally make a nuisance of yourself as you follow the clues to the…well, you'll just have to wait and see.

You'll need to follow the php|architect folks on Twiiter (Elizabeth Tucker, Marco Tabini and Cal Evans) to get clues about the hunt. First prize is a ticket to php|tek this year but other prizes include a ticket to their next Virtual Summit, any three books from their catalog and a free one-year subscription to the magazine.

Once you've found the solution, you'll need to enter it here to be entered. Good luck!

php|architect magazine has started a program to help out those in need via the Red Cross. To encourage donations, they'll provide a free subscription for anyone giving $25 USD or more to the Red Cross' effort.

It is in the time of crisis that communities pull together to help those in need; the PHP community is no different. Past experience has shown the generosity of the PHP community and we know that many of you have already stepped up to help. All of us at php|architect want to encourage you to join us in giving to the Red Cross to support their relief efforts in Japan.

By forwarding the contribution confirmation email to the address in the post, you'll be sent a subscription coupon good for a free year of the magazine. You must have your email submitted by 5pm EDT on Friday Marth 18th to be considered.

On the LogicPool site there's a new post with a list of PHP+MySQL code generators you can use if there's not a specific framework involved in your application (most of those come with code generation tools already).

Some of these tools can rapidly build a fully functional application, but there's more to most useful applications than simply displaying a list of fields for users to fill out and viewing the results from an admin only accessible area. Most applications will need tweaks that can be small to large depending on the requirements. Keep that in mind when looking at these products as the amount of effort required to tweak the code produced by these tools.

Tools on their list (some free, some paid services) include:

• AppGini
• PPMaker 7
• ScriptCase
• Xataface

NETTUTS.com is having a give away of some free copies of the Packt book "Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide" for anyone that comments on the post.

Magento is one of the most popular PHP eCommerce solutions available for web developers. In their own words, it's the fastest growing eCommerce platform in the world. Packt Publishing has generously donated a handful of copies of their latest Magento book, called "Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide".

The book goes into the depth PHP developers will need to really get into the heart of Magento and create customized modules with advanced functionality to make it just what you need.