Kae Verens has posted another book review today covering APress' "Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More" (by Kevin McArthur).

This book is absolutely jam-packed with information useful to the medium-advanced PHP coder. SPL is described over a few chapters, and a quick intro to Zend's MVC framework is provided. Of particular interest to me were the final chapters, to do with certificate-based authentication, and a chapter near the beginning describing the upcoming features of PHP6. Great book - I really enjoyed it.

The review gets into detail on some of the chapters and some of the shortfalls that Kae saw about them. Things like:

• The title says "frameworks" but only one is really discussed (Zend Framework)
• The testing/continuous development sections weren't long enough
• The "web 2.0" section was a little sparse
• The only real web service protocol talked about is SOAP.

Overall, though Kae found the book to be worthy of a place on any developer's shelf.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a sample chapter from a new book Packt Publishing has put out called "Pro PHP, Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and more by Kevin McArthur.

So today you get a double bonus. You get to check out Pro PHP, Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and more by Kevin McArthur. You also get a great tutorial on SPL!

The sample chapter looks (obviously) at the SPL, the Standard PHP Library - functions included with PHP5 releases to accomplish some pretty cool things.

The IBM developerWorks site has a new article posted that talks about design patterns, five of them in particular, that can help to "accelerate your PHP development" and make your code more maintainable down the line.

As an application developer, you can have a lifelong career without ever knowing what any of the patterns are called or how or when they're used. However, I've found that a good working knowledge of these patterns, as well as those introduced in the developerWorks article "Five common PHP design patterns" (see Resources), allows you to do two things: Enable high-bandwidth conversations and reduce painful lessons.

The patterns they talk about in this "five more" article of the series are:

• Adapter Pattern
• Iterator Pattern
• Decorator Pattern
• Delegate Pattern
• State Pattern

Diagrams are provided for each of them, showing how they flow along with brief code examples (structures really) to show how that transitions over to actual use.

On the Tiger Heron blog today, Tony Freixas has posted a new article talking about the use of two patterns (no, not design patterns) in PHP development - the Bait-and-Switch method and the Shell Game.

Originally, I planned to write about how to configure the Apache server to run both PHP4 and PHP5. With the push toward PHP5 (see Go PHP5), there are now hundreds of articles covering that topic. Instead, I will talk about two IT patterns I use for PHP development on Windows. The patterns are ancient and familiar to most Unix developers, but little used in the Windows world.

He uses something he calls "junction points" to make both of the patterns work and describes a bit about what they are and how to create them. Then, it's on to the descriptions - he covers what each of the patterns is about and includes a method for implementing it. The Bait-and-Switch is mostly about swapping out multiple software versions transparently and the Shell Game uses a shell script to handle the creation of the environment and the execution instead.

The results of this week's International PHP Magazine poll have been posted. The question this time asked which, out of the four choices they gave, was the most popular opinion when dealing with objects in PHP.

Coming out on top with 33.3% of the votes is "Folks who follow design patterns religiously are missing the point" - an interesting choice for most of the developers out there. Design patterns can be one of the most useful bits of functionality in an application if used right. The option, however, is a bit vague - do they mean that they only use design patterns in their code or that they use them at all?

There was a tie for second place between the "Other reasons" and "Classes and inheritance are not new to PHP 5" options. Pulling up the rear with only 5.6% of the votes was the last option, "Managing state between pages is very straight forward in PHP".

Be sure to check out and vote in this week's poll (a bit better subject matter) that asks the question "Why Does PHP Suck?".

In his latest blog post, Tobias Schlitt shares a bit of a book review about one of the latest (German) PHP-related offerings from O'Reilly - PHP Design Patterns.

I seized the time on the tram yesterday night to take a look at it and I have to admit I'm quite impressed. Stephan managed to write down a lot of practical experience in respect to the implementation of OO patterns with PHP.

Tobias talks about the structure of the book (recommending it to anyone looking to learn OOP in PHP), and mentions some of the chapter topics including:

• New OOP features in PHP5
• Basic OOP concepts
• Generation Patterns (Singleton, Factory, etc)
• Behavior Patterns (Subject/Observer, Visitor, Iterator)

While some books only touch the theory of design patterns and avoid giving practical examples to the user, Stephan manages very good to combine both.

Writing a programming-related book these days is no simple matter, especially when it's on a bit more complex topic like design patterns. Stephan Schmidt has come out the other side unscathed and is announcing the official release of his book from O'Reilly - "PHP Design Patterns".

After nearly a year of work, my first very own book has finally been published and arrived last weekend.

PHP Design Patterns is published by O'Reilly and introduces the reader to the world of patterns by providing practical examples.

One small note, though - the book is written in German, so English-only readers might not find this the book for them. If you want more information on the book, though, you can check out its website for full details and some code examples.

DevShed ramps up another new series today with this new article giving developers a look at working with object-oriented programming through the eyes of design patterns. It's another excerpt from the George Schlossnagle book "Advanced PHP Programming".

This chapter provides an overview of the advanced OO features now available in PHP. Some of the examples developed here will be used throughout the rest of this book and will hopefully serve as a demonstration that certain problems really benefit from the OO approach.

The article lays down the foundation for the more complex information to come. It introduces object-oriented programming briefly, and talks about some of the handy features of it - like inheritance, static attributes and methods.

Pádraic Brady is "back in business" and back posting again on his blog with this new item talking about the reactivation of his Patterns for PHP website.

It's appropriate to take stock of the projects I dropped for the Summer. Among them is the Patterns For PHP website. The project is now once again active. To facilitate some easy feedback options and let the Administrators discuss issues, planning and some maintenance tasks we'll be performing I have added a phpBB forum to the mix.

The forums he mentions are up and active for all developers out there looking for a place to congregate and talk about the use of patterns in PHP.

Stephan Schmidt has posted some great news to the PHP-Tools blog today - the O'Reilly book he's been working on "PHP Design Patterns" has been completed and sent off to press.

The work of the last six months is finally bearing fruit and I will be able to spend my spare time on coding again instead of just writing. If you wondered, why patTemplate or any of my other open source projects did not show any progress, this announcement should answer your questions.

I put nearly all of my thoughts on software architecture, OO design and patterns into this book and thus it consists of 370 pages dealing with OO development in PHP 5.1, creational patterns, structural patterns, behavioural patterns as well as enterprise patterns and MVC architectures. Furthermore it covers SPL, Propel and patTemplate to provide some real-life examples of the patterns.

A note to all readers out there, though - the book is in German (despite the English title). If you want to check out a sample bit of code from the book or just want to get more information on it, check out it's website.