The Zend Developer Zone has a new post today, a book review of the Sams Publishing book "Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer's Guide" (by Peter MacIntyre and Iam Morse).

My buddy Pete MacIntyre has been after me to review his book for some time now and honest Pete, it's been sitting on my desk since it arrived patiently awaiting my attention. So last night I broke down and went through it. I'll have to say I was impressed with what I saw.

He (the reviewer, Cal) notes that, while the book comes in at about 180 pages - light for a tech book these days - to still gives a great overview of the technology for those already familiar with the Eclipse setup.

Gyorgy Fekete has provided what he calls a complete guide to PHP development on Mac OS X in a recent blog entry.

Finally, I switched entirely to Mac. It is a little frustrating that there is not a complete resource on how to set up a web development enviroment on Mac OS X. The majority of tutorials are outdated. I will try to write this guide as complete as possible.

The guide provides basic installation instructions for PHP, MySQL (XAMPP or MAMP), the configuration of these two packages, throwing XDebug in to help with your debugging, installing Subversion and picking out your IDE of choice. He also suggests a somewhat optional step - setting up a Windows virtual machine to be able to test things out cross-platform without the need for a separate machine.

Stefan Priebsch has posted about the official release of his book, one of the latest from php|architect press - "php|architect's Guide to PHP 5 Migration".

Thanks to the hard work of Elizabeth, Marco, and all the others at php|architect, my new book, php|architect's Guide to PHP 5 Migration has been released.

The book aims to be the only one you'll need when it comes to guiding you and your applications from the PHP4 dark ages up to the world of PHP5. You can order your copy directly from php|architect - the Print/PDF combo for about $33 CAD and the PDF only for around $30 CAD.

The CodeIgniter blog has pointed out something indicating the spread in popularity of the framework - a Japanese CodeIgniter book:

A testament to the strength and flexibility of CodeIgniter is how quickly its been adopted internationally. Today, some of the very active users at CodeIgniter Japan have released CodeIgniter Tettei Nyumon (The Definitive Guide to CodeIgniter).

You can find out more about CodeIgniter Japan from their site. You can also order yourself a copy online.

On PHPFreaks.com there's a new tutorial providing a beginner's guide to debugging in PHP (with the built in functionality PHP has, not external software).

Everyday the forums see probably hundreds of topics posted where the problem is a fairly simple error. [...] As a beginner, it can be difficult to find and solve these errors. By tackling each of these in turn, I hope to teach you some methods of finding and solving them.

They look at the different sorts of errors - syntax errors, fatal errors, warnings, notices - as well as some of the ones a bit harder to track down like database problems and logical errors.

The Nettuts site has posted a detailed guide to the "comments.php" file that comes with every release of WordPress:

WordPress seems to be everywhere these days, and it's no wonder with it's ease of use and ease of customization. In this tutorial, I'll be dissecting the default WordPress theme's comments.php structure and giving you various snippets of code to make your skinning easier.

The guide breaks down the major parts of the file - some of the general code, how it displays comments, the comment submission form and some "little tricks" it does to handle things like comment numbers, links and the alternating colors.

We can expect big things from Davey Shafik in the coming months - he's been working on a book for php|architect about one of the more powerful bits of functionality in PHP - streams.

For about 6 months now, I've been itching to write a book on the PHP Streams Layer - one of my favorite features of PHP; and also one of the least known considering it's powerful abilities.

He describes his goal simply as this: to create the definitive resource for working with the streams later in PHP. It should be out sometime in the third quarter of 2008, so keep your eye out for it then.

Davey Shafik has posted a quick update about the php|architect guide to the Zend PHP5 Certification exam and its updates.

Just a quick note to say that the second edition of the study guide has been released. It features all erratta items fixed, as well as a new chapter on Database Programming. If you didn't grab it yet, it makes a great reference for any intermediate and above developer, as well as obviously being the study guide that it is meant to be

You can get more information on the book (and place your order) on the book's website - zceguide.com.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted episode eleven of their ZendCon Session podcast series today, Brian DeShong's talk from ZendCon 2007 on development methods.

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 Brian DeShong present "The Grown-Up Company's Guide to Development".

There's two ways to get this new episode - either download it directly from the ZDZ or you can subscribe to the feed and get this and other great recordings from the 2007 Zend conference.

One of the more frustrating things about working on a shared server is trying to keep it secure while still giving users some flexibility in their environments. Stuart Herbert has continued his series looking at combating issues like this with this look at installing suexec to secure a shared server.

The challenge with securing a shared hosting server is how to secure the website from attack both from the outside and from the inside. PHP has built-in features to help, but ultimately it's the wrong place to address the problem.

His guide steps through the entire process - getting the software, configuring Apache (with the PHP/CGI installation) and configuring suexec, both for the default install and then for the shared server settings. There's even a few brief benchmarks showing the speed of execution for scripts with and without the suexec environment.