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.

If you've been around the PHP community for any length of time, chances are you've seen the ElePHPant stuffed animals that have been floating around conferences and living on developers' desks. Well, the Zend Framework has decided to create some of their own - a more green variety. Pádraic Brady has posted about them.

Blue PHP ElePHPant plush toys are so yesterday. Ben Scholzen (you might know him as DASPRiD on IRC/Twitter) is now taking pre-orders for green Zend Framework ElePHPants. Yes, they are green. Yes, they have “ZF” printed on them. No, they are not a repository of Zend Framework knowledge. We tried really hard, but Intel insists that magical toys from the future are not real. Ben needs to reach a minimum production order of 1000 small ZF ElePHPants and is currently hovering at around 200 after the weekend. If you, your user group, or your pet poodle want one of these, visit Ben’s pre-order page for more information.

As of the time of this post, the orders for these elePHPants is at about 190 out of the 1000 needed, so if you'd like to pick some up, get over and put in your pre-order now!

If you've been trying to get your hands on one of the cuddly little mascots for PHP (the elePHPant) but haven't managed to yet, there's some good news! Another run of the fuzzy little animals is being done (the 6th) and this time they're offering something new - pink elePHPants.

As we are now out of every of the 5 first generation of the elephpants, it is time to start a 6th. You'll find here all information to include yourself. [...] Fill in your elephpants wishes. We do not need any payement now. We will contact you directly before starting the generation for the actual payement.

Their schedule hopes to end the pre-order process on December 20th (just three days away) and to strat production on these pre-orders by January 10th. The end results would be shipped out for delivery in April 2011. If you'd like to lay claim to some of your own, go over to the order form and select the size (large/small) and the color (blue/pink) and fill in the contact info. Unfortunately, because of production restrictions, single elePHPants cannot be ordered, so consider getting together with a local user group and all chipping in for a box!

From this post on Sebastian Bergmann's blog, we learn about an update to the original O'Reilly "PHP Pocket Reference" (German translation edition) book by Rasmus Lerdorf.

Garvin Hicking has updated the German edition of Rasmus Lerdorf's "PHP Pocket Reference" book for PHP 5 and I wrote the introduction to object-oriented programming chapter for this new edition.

More information here.

This will be the third edition of the book, with some major updates made to include the new features that PHP 5 has to offer. The functions are now categoriezed a bit better to make for quick lookup, and the introduction is reworked to includes some of the updates as well.

From this post on Sebastian Bergmann's blog, we learn about an update to the original O'Reilly "PHP Pocket Reference" (German translation edition) book by Rasmus Lerdorf.

Garvin Hicking has updated the German edition of Rasmus Lerdorf's "PHP Pocket Reference" book for PHP 5 and I wrote the introduction to object-oriented programming chapter for this new edition.

More information here.

This will be the third edition of the book, with some major updates made to include the new features that PHP 5 has to offer. The functions are now categoriezed a bit better to make for quick lookup, and the introduction is reworked to includes some of the updates as well.