With more and more frameworks popping up every day in the PHP community, it's important to ask yourself one question - should I learn a framework? Ian Christian tries to answer that question in a recent post to his blog.

With other programming languages designed for the web, there's typically a framework that works hand in hand. [...] I imagine people will always write from the ground up with PHP, some people do it to learn, some I suspect think there's nothing out there that can do what they want, where as others perhaps do it just to prove themselves, or to gain fame. Good luck to them all, some of them are probably going to do a good job, but alas - I imagine most are wasting their time.

He breaks his opinions out into two sides of the argument - the business issues and the developer side, each with their own plusses and minuses. Overall, though, he definitely suggests learning some kind of framework, even if you don't end up working with it - it's just good experience.

On the Developer Tutorials blog, Akash Mehta offers some suggestions of resources and methods for learning how to use regular expressions in your PHP applications.

When it comes to quickly dealing with large blocks of data, batch processing operations or screen scraping, regular expressions are often the most effective solution. There's just one problem, though - learning them can be as hard as learning a new language altogether. Here's how to get off to a flying start.

He points you first in the direction of the preg_* functions then towards a few examples (like with mod_rewrite) and tools to help you understand how things match, like the regex tested extension for firefox and the regular expression cheat sheet on ILoveJackDaniels.com.

PageChain.net has posted a list of some "great places to go to" to learn PHP right now - some resources out on the web that can help you get started, provide examples and give you community to support you in your development.

Here are some resources to help you not only learn PHP, but also reference PHP information should you ever need it. This list isn't exhaustive, however, it should provide you with a lot of help when you need your PHP fix.

Some of the sites included in their list include:

• W3Schools PHP Tutorials
• Good PHP Tutorials
• PHPFreaks
• ONLamp

In a new post to the blog at deasil.com, they talk about some of the lessons they see that can be learned from PHP and how it works/is packaged up.

PHP, though, came along with a breakthrough idea - mod_php was an everything in one install. Unlike mod_perl, mod_php gave you a programming language, templating language and extension all in one.

He advocates the PHP language developer's decisions to include everything into the core of the language which (while maybe not the best of decisions) has made PHP into one of the most practical development languages and has helped to make it one of the most popular and widely used languages on the web.

The PHPClasses.org website has posted their review of a Packt Publishing book covering PDO - "Learning PHP Data Objects" (by Dennis Poppel).

In Learning PHP Data Objects, the author, Dennis Popel, examines this new system and explains how to begin using PDO in development as a replacement for typical database drivers. The book is an excellent introduction to the data abstraction layer. It also provides essential insight into the inner workings of database interaction with PHP.

The review talks about the contents of the book, what PDO is/how it's used and how well the book hits the mark for its target audience.

Stefan Mischook has posted another take on why he thinks PHP developers should learn object-oriented programming:

For people new to OOP and are comfortable with 'classic' procedural php, you may be wondering why should you even bother to learn object oriented concepts...why go through the trouble?

He has several suggestions included in the post like:

• PHP is moving in an OOP direction [...] So, to really understand and use these frameworks properly, you need to understand object oriented PHP.
• Object oriented PHP really begins to shine as the project becomes more complex, and when you have more than one person doing the programming.
• OOP is the modern way of software development and all the major languages [...] it only makes sense (in terms of career,) to keep your skills up-to-date.
• OOP based PHP is much easier to maintain and update

He also suggests a method for developers to get started with OOP in PHP - how to plan out a project and think in objects rather than procedurally.

On the KillerPHP.com blog, there's two new posts from Stefan Mischook following along the same sort of path - people being introduced to PHP, whether it be by books or videos.

In the first post, he explains (via a video) why he started the KillerPHP website and some of his thoughts on PHP - including his recommendation that every web designer/developer out there learn it.

In his second post, he tackles the other topic - why PHP books are difficult for people who aren't already programmers.

I've read 20+ books on PHP and have watched many videos. One thing that I found consistent about all of them was how they were not 'friendly' to non-nerd types. Why? Probably because (most of the time,) only hardcore code-monkeys seem to be writing these books.

To that effect, he's created his video series to help the non-developers of the world learn this great language in a simple, easy to follow fashion.

A few days back there was a post on the "The Codist" blog about why the author would never quite understand the appeal of PHP to the masses and some of his thoughts behind it. Well, there was such an outcry and response to his comments that he's written up another post on what he learned from comments made.

Clearly I touched a nerve. However I did learn a lot of things that you don't read in a quickly tutorial on PHP. The whole point of writing something is to get feedback, positive or negative, and hopefully learn from it.

He admits that his experience with PHP and its developers has been limited, so his perspective might have been thrown off a bit. He still holds to one thing from the previous article, though - that PHP just isn't for him.

In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.

Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.

Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".

In his his latest blog entry, Felix Geisendörfer makes a recommendation for anyone working with the CakePHP framework. He suggests doing something that most might avoid - diving into the source to find out how things work.

When hanging out in #cakephp I usally try to answer questions people have as good as I can. A lot of the times I have no idea what the answer is and in most cases the fastest way to find out is by looking at the core code. Ok, the manual is pretty decent these days and I would recommend most people to look for an answer in there first. But if you take the time to study the core code, you'll be able to answer almost any question by yourself, no matter if it has been answered somewhere before.

He talks about other advantages like finding those hidden, undocumented features already supported by the framework. Since this is the first part of the series, he just looks at how to get into the source. He starts off with the basic index.php file that comes installed with the distribution and a chunk of code that helps run the index file and is at the heart of how CakePHP works - the Dispatcher.