Kae Verens has posted a new book review of one of Packt Publising's latest PHP-related offerings, "Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management":

In short, my review is this: overall, the book detailed everything I can think of (and more) about phpMyAdmin - I learned about some features in phpMyAdmin that I was not already aware of. I would ask for less screenshots, more how-tos and less 3rd-person speech for the next revision, but if there are any questions I have about phpMyAdmin, the answer is in this book.

The review gets into more detail about the book - its structure, the wealth of content in it (including some unknown features) and a few things that could have been better. Kae mentions a few places where the author "forgets that the reader does not know the subject" and gets a bit too technical too fast. The screenshots, while good in moderation, overpowered parts of the chapters and made them harder to follow.

On PHP.net today, there's a note about an addition to the O'Reilly classic book (an asset to any developer's library) "Mastering Regular Expressions" - a full 48-page chapter on PHP.

The book is described as:

Mastering Regular Expressions quickly covers the basics of regular-expression syntax, then delves into the mechanics of expression-processing, common pitfalls, performance issues, and implementation-specific differences. Written in an engaging style and sprinkled with solutions to complex real-world problems, Mastering Regular Expressions offers a wealth information that you can put to immediate use.

This new edition is the third release for the book.

PHPit.net has posted a new book review today covering a new one from Packt Publishing and by Marc Delisle - "Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management" (so much for short names).

Although not strictly a PHP book, it's still very valuable to any PHP developer, because phpMyAdmin is often an important part of development, especially during the early stages of database design. phpMyAdmin is the de facto MySQL database tool, and this book will take you through everything phpMyAdmin has to offer. Read on to learn more about this book.

The review starts with aon overview of the various chapters - from the introduction, to the installation, an interface overview, and using and exporting your data, and much more.

His opinion overall is that the book provides more than enough information for both beginner and advanced developers to find what they need about phpMyAdmin.

On Christian Wenz's blog today, there's an announcement about one of the latest books from Packt - Mastering Mambo which he was a co-author on.

When Tobias and I created the CMS book series for German publisher Hanser, we also wrote the first series title on Mambo/Joomla!. We afterwards sold the translation rights to Packt Publishing. They already had a Mambo book, but liked our material so they took the last two thirds of the book, translated it and thereby created "Mastering Mambo".

The book covers topics like creating custom layouts, builing multilingual sites, using a forum, using the Mambo extensions, and how to develop your own modules...