Cal Evans has officially announced his latest in his series of full-day virtual conferences aimed at PHP developers - the PHP Master Series, Volume 1 (from the Day Camp 4 Developers):

There is a lot of good information shared at conferences and sadly not event 1% of developers who identify themselves as PHP developers, ever get to attend one. This makes me sad. So I'm trying something new. [...] I went through the PHP conferences from the second-half of this year and picked out 6 that really stood out. This was a very difficult task; the PHP community and conferences are blessed with a bounty of great talks and speakers. The criteria I used was topics, joind.in score, and speaker. I tried to find talks that were on topics that are of interest to developers, that others liked, and that were given by speakers I know, and know do a good job.

This one-day virtual event is happening December 21st (a Friday) and is made up of six different talks from six different speakers:

• Designing Beautiful Software - Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• Cryptography For The Average Developer - Anthony Ferrara
• Javascript Best Practices & BackboneJS for the PHP Developer - Ryan Weaver
• Your code sucks, let's fix it. - Rafael Dohms
• Building a Firehose - Ian Barber
• From POX to HATEOAS, A Real Company's Journey Building a RESTful API - Luke Stokes

You can pick up your ticket to attend for just $50 USD as a regular attendee (or voice only for those that just want to listen in). There's also an option for an "Office Party" for $100 USD if you have more than a few folks that would like to attend.

In a new post Alexey Zakhlestins talks about a project he's been working on, a part of the split up with PHP-GTK out into separate projects. His part of the group is GObject with has now been moved over to github.

This new PHP extension is called "GObject for PHP", so, my main concern, obviously is building comfortable bridge between GObject objects and PHP's objects. It starts to work, but there's a lot of stuff to be done. Please join the project, if you are interested. We need more hands!

He describes some of the features already in the library - counterparts for parts of the current GObject world in PHP including GType, GSignal and GParamSpec. This is all on the master branch. In his "introspection" branch he's working on the introspection idea the GNOME community has been working towards too.

On the Listmania site there's a recent post introducing you to ten PHP books that can help you to master the language and move forward in your development skills.

PHP is the widely-used, free, and efficient alternative to competitors such as Microsoft's ASP. If you are just starting up trying to learn PHP then this post is just what you're looking for as it list 10 really good books that will get you started well.

Books included in their list of ten are things like:

• PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th Edition)
• PHP Cookbook : Solution and Examples for PHP Programers
• Head First PHP & MySQL
• Beginning PHP and MySQL
• PHP Objects, Patterns, Third Edition

Obviously these books are for developers at different levels in their skillsets, but you can pick out the ones from this list that might suit you best. My personal recommendation is for "PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice" by Matt Zandstra.

Earlier in the month the Internet Resources blog posted ten principles from the PHP masters (well-known people connected to PHP and various projects). Tips include:

• Use PHP Only When You Need it - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Never, ever trust your users - Dave Child
• Invest in PHP Caching - Ben Balbo
• Make Better Use of PHP's Filter Functions - Joey Sochacki
• Use Batch Processing - Jack D. Herrington

Check out the rest of the post for helpful hints from other masters in the community such as Josh Sharp, David Cummings and Chad Kieffer.

Rob Allen (as a part of his work on his WinPHP Challenge entry) has posted a little code snippet to his blog about fetching the list of all databases sitting on a SQL Server instance.

I need to get a list of databases from SQL Server for the currently logged in user. Initially, I found a built in function sp_databases. This looked promising, until I discovered that it didn't work for my user. I'm pretty sure that it's related to permissions. The user just has db_owner on a specific database and nothing else.

He ended up selecting from a sys.database table where the name wasn't in a grouping of standard SQL Server databases (like "master" or "msdb"). He wrapped this in a foreach with a try/catch to catch errors thrown and drops all of the names into a regular array.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted their seventeenth episode in the ZendCon Sessions podcast series today. This time it's Jay Pipes' MySQL-centric talk The Legend of Drunken Query Master.

The ZendCon Sessions are live recordings of sessions that have been given at previous Zend Conferences. Combined with the slides, they can be the next best thing to having attended the conference itself. In this series we will be releasing regular sessions from ZendCon 2008 as we lead up to this year's ZendCon.

You can check out his slides as you listen to the episode either through the in-page player, downloading the mp3 directly or subscribing to the podcast's feed.

Mark Karpeles has created something that most people would think he's crazy for - a DNS daemon written in PHP:

If you want to tell me I'm crazy, you can post it in a comment here, it makes me happy. I had some reasons to dislike bind9 which finally made me write my own DNS daemon, and I'll explain that here. My need was to have a stable dynamic DNS server working in most environments, with an easy to configure master/slave relationship (with realtime synchronization), and a way to change records instantly from PHP...

Rather than using the (slightly unstable) dlz technology to pull the information from a MySQL database, he opted to roll his own that includes support for:

• RFC 1035 standards
• realtime data update
• slave/master relationship (with a keepalive connection)

Want to try it out for yourself? Drop him a line and ask about it!

He's also run some statistics on the performance of the daemon as compared to the standard BIND installation and come up with some instructions on how you can install and configure your own instance.

WebReference.com has the second part of their CakePHP introductory series posted, this time focusing on the actions in the controllers.

They talk (briefly) about how the call to the page is passed off to the controller's action and how you can get more information into it via POSTed values.

There's also a look at redirection, from action to action in a controller (or even to another one) and a look at a very handy method of sharing functions between the child controllers - a "master" parent controller (in their case, AppController).

At the end, they throw in a bit about components - module and reusable bits of functionality that can be passed around from controller to controller, action to action.

This series of articles are excerpts from the Packt book CakePHP Application Development.

On the Solar blog Paul Jones has posted about a new database adapter they included in the latest Solar framework release - one that lets you connect to master/slave MySQL setups.

With Solar, you connect to SQL databases using the Solar_Sql factory class, which returns a Solar_Sql_Adapter class for you. Most developers only need to connect to a single MySQL server. [...] However, when you get into a situation where you need to scale up, you might need a replicated MySQL database setup. In such cases, there is one "master" server that handles reads and writes, and there are one or more "slave" servers that are read-only.

The Solar_Sql_Adapter_MysqlReplicated adapter does all of the switching for you, making it as simple as dropping it in and changing your configuration to point to the master and slave servers (examples included).

The NETTUTS website has posted a top ten list of things from the PHP masters out there, a few words of wisdom to live by. Here's the list along with the authors of each:

• Use PHP Only When You Need it - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Use Many Tables With PHP and MYSQL for Scalability - Matt Mullenweg
• Never, ever trust your users - Dave Child
• Invest in PHP Caching - Ben Balbo
• Speed up PHP Development with an IDE, Templates and Snippets - Chad Kieffer
• Make Better Use of PHP's Filter Functions - Joey Sochacki
• Use a PHP Framework - Josh Sharp
• Don't use a PHP Framework - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Use Batch Processing - Jack D. Herrington
• Turn on Error Reporting Immediately - David Cummings

Some of them are conflicting, but that just means that you'll have to do what you've always done - take advice with a grain of salt and ultimately decide what's best for you and your application.