If you've ever been interested in using Varnish as a caching layer for your application but weren't sure where to start, you're in luck. In a post to his site Thijs Feryn has announced the release of his book covering Varnish and helping you get started integrating it into your infrastructure.

I’m proud to announce that my Varnish book is out now. It’s called “Getting Started With Varnish Cache” and it’s available for download through Varnish Software. For the next 30 days, Varnish Software has the exclusive rights to distribute the book. After that, O’Reilly will also be distributing physical copies and the digital version of the book, while Varnish Software will continue to distribute the book on their website.

Varnish Software is currently offering the book for free (well, "free" after you give your personal info). Thijs gets into a bit of detail around the book, the process he followed creating it and what kinds of things Varnish can help with. He points out that it was "one hell of a ride" writing the book and getting it published but notes that it was a "fun experience" and probably won't be the last book he writes.

The O'Reilly Web Programming blog recently posted an interview with Matt Stauffer, the author of their recently published Laravel: Up & Running book. In the interview Matt talks about becoming a "web artisan" and offers some advice you could apply to your own development work.

I recently asked Matt Stauffer, Partner and Technical Director at Tighten Co. to discuss his work with the Laravel community, including what makes the PHP framework great for rapid application development and how it interoperates with new and emerging frontend tooling. Matt is also the author of Laravel: Up and Running, which O'Reilly published in November 2016.

Matt answers questions about the Laravel framework (why it's for "web artisans"), using it for prototyping, upcoming features he's excited about and advice he has for those just starting out in web development. Check out the full post for the answers to these and other questions.

The Laravel News site has a post about the official release of a new Laravel-related book, "Laravel Up and Running" from author and well-known Laravel-er Matt Stauffer.

Matt Stauffer who has been blogging about Laravel since the 5.0 release, the host of the Laravel Podcast, and partner and technical director at Tighten.co has been working on a new Laravel book, Laravel: Up & Running, published by O’Reilly.

The post lists out just some of the topics the book covers including:

• Tools for gathering, validating, normalizing, and filtering user-provided data
• PHPUnit, Mockery, and PHPSpec for testing your PHP code
• Interfaces for file system access, sessions, cookies, caches, and search
• Laravel’s specialty packages: Scout, Passport, Cashier, Echo, Elixir, Valet, and Socialite

You can order it now from O'Reilly as an ebook but the paperback will follow soon. The post also includes a mini-interview from Matt about the release of his book.

On the O'Reilly Software Engineering blog there's a post from Gregory Brown sharing what he thinks is the definition of a "proficient programmer" and how it differs from competence.

Do you know what the difference between competence and proficiency is? That sounds like a trick question, because the words seem to mean the same thing. But the subtle distinction between them is critically important.

Competence means having enough experience and knowledge to get stuff done; proficiency involves knowing why you are doing something in a certain way, and how it fits into the big picture. In other words, a proficient practitioner is always a competent practitioner, but the opposite may not be true.

He goes on to talk about the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition and how it relates to the biggest bottleneck he sees for developers: "crossing the divide from competence to proficiency." He defines what it means to be a "competent" programmer first and then one of the things junior developers struggle with - thinking knowledge is enough to make you more competent. He gives a more concrete example of this with the use of the Memento pattern, when to use and - for the competent side - when it breaks down.

He ends the post with some suggestions that can help you if you're wanting to make the jump from "proficient" to "competent" (even if you've been programming for a long time, some good tips here).

Matt Stauffer has a post to his site sharing a few things he didn't know Laravel could do as discovered during his work on his book Laravel Up & Running.

It turns out that there's a long road between "I have a book contract" and "I know everything there is to know in order to write this book."

It doesn't matter how much of an expert you feel like. It doesn't matter how much time you've spent learning and teaching. Across the board, every tech author I've talked to has described just how much they learned—had to learn—when they wrote a book.

I learned a lot in writing Laravel: Up and Running. And I want to share it with you.

He includes a list of four of the interesting things he learned during his writing:

• The Cookie Facade is one special cookie
• Attaching files to emails is easier than you think
• You can chain more Scheduler methods than the docs show
• You can assert that a view gets passed certain data

Each item also comes with a brief code example showing it in action. If you'd like more information about the book and a free sample, be sure to sign up using the form in the post or you can just pre-order the book and get the whole thing as soon as it's released.

If you're interested in the Laravel framework and possibly using it for your upcoming projects but aren't sure where to start, you should consider checking out Matt Stauffer's upcoming O'Reilly book "Laravel: Up and Running". According to this post on the Laravel News site the book is now available for pre-order.

Matt Stauffer has been writing a new book on Laravel named Laravel: Up and Running: A Framework for Building Modern PHP Apps and it’s published by O’Reilly Media. [...] This first edition is 250 pages and will come in either paperback or ebook form, but this current preorder is only available in paperback. Based on Amazon the expected shipping date is August 25, 2016.

The book walks you through the creation of a Laravel application from start to finish. it's no meant as a reference but a "work book" to teach the foundations of the framework. It hopes to provide a single point where developers, especially those familiar with "C-family programming languages", will be able to get started quickly.

As Davey Shafik mentions in this post to his site, O'Reilly has just released a "mini-eBook" he's written up to help you migrate your current codebase up to PHP 7 compatibility.

Yesterday, O’Reilly published my report on Upgrading to PHP 7. This 80-page mini-eBook is available free (and DRM free) in ePub, Mobi, and PDF formats.

Grab it today or read more details here.

The book guides you through the updates and features that come along with PHP 7 including: "deprecated features, Unicode enhancements, changes in Object-Oriented programming, and other enhancements." You'll get more details on what to change to bring your code up to the level of PHP 7 and remove deprecated features and what to replace them with. The book is free so there's no reason not to pick up a copy and find out what the PHP 7 revolution is all about.

Lorna Mitchell has officially announced the release of her O'Reilly-published book about creating and working with web services in PHP, PHP Web Services.

I'm delighted to announce that my new book "PHP Web Services" is now available as an early release! [...] The book isn't huge (or expensive, hint!), but it aims to give solid theory in a practical and approachable way. There's the topics you'd expect to see, covering HTTP and verbs and headers and status codes, and also around data formats. It also covers RPC services including SOAP, and also has a chapter (predictably the longest one!) about REST. I've tried to go beyond simply the "how to do" and into the "how to do in a kick-ass manner" realm, so there are chapters about how to design your API and choose what kind to build, how to handle errors, how to make your API really robust - and of course how to debug when things go wrong!

The book not only has the summaries and descriptions of some common web service challenges, but also includes code samples you can use in your own projects.

Lorna Mitchell has posted a book review of an O'Reilly publication (by Steve Francia) - "MongoDB and PHP".

The tone of the book is quite informal and approachable [...]. This book also does a great job of deferring to other resources where that is appropriate; in particular where some features of MongoDB will change rapidly and the online documentation is well-maintained. [...] There is no hiding from the very lovely, very technical, features available in MongoDB and although this book doesn't drill into all the possible use cases of each one, it does cover some advanced topics such as sharding and GridFS which was completely new to me.

Her review of the book is positive, noting that it takes a topic that, despite possibly being overwhelming for someone new to it, makes it approachable and easy to digest. You can find out more about this book on the O'Reilly website.

Rafael Dohms has posted a new review of a book that focuses on helping you create better, more readable code - "The Art of Readable Code" (Dustin Boswell, Trevor Foucher, O'Reilly). This is isn't about "pretty code" as much as it is manageable, easy to follow structures and logic flows.

"The Art of Readable Code" was written by Dustin Bowell and Trevor Foucher and basically focuses on concepts and suggestions to make you code not just readable, but comprehendible by other developers, or as the author’s suggest, yourself in six months. Code readability is a topic that I truly believe the PHP community does not focus enough on and i really wanted a look at this book to see what kind of ideas it had and what I could do my best to bring to the attention of other developers.

The book is language-agnostic and provides ideas that developers should keep in mind when doing their development - clear variable names, making comments that make sense, refactoring tips and hints for implementing your ideas in code. He recommends the book to any developer (in any language) to help them make code that will stand the test of time and be easier to manage/understand in the future.