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.

Tony Bibbs has posted his own review of a recently released PHP-related book from APress, "Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More" (by Kevin McArthur):

First I think it's important to cover the valuable aspects of the book as that will really drive your decision whether the book is worth a read. If you are new to object oriented programming and basic design patterns you will get a fairly good introduction of how to do both in PHP.

He points out some of his favorite parts of the book - the chapter on exceptions, chapter three covering the Standard PHP library - and some of the things he thought could be improved like the order of the parts of the book (4 should be after 1) and his disappointment in the lack of security/scalability/performance topics.

Jonathan Street has posted a review of APress Publishing's "Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More" (by Kevin McArthur):

When the title talks about patterns, frameworks, testing and more it's not kidding. Kevin McArthur has managed to stuff a lot of information into the three hundred and some pages which make up this book. The inevitable trade-off is that no one section is a complete introduction to the subject it's covering. Despite this the book is filled with what I can only describe as, "Ah-hah!" and "Doh!" moments

While he found the book to be overall satisfying, there were a few things he'd like to change - not enough "enterprise-y" discussion for a book with "Pro" in the title, the "jack of all trades, master of none" feeling in the chapters and some issues with the Web 2.0 chapter that he feels only "partially relate to the core subject" of the book.

Amir Saied has posted a book review of a new book from APress publishing "ProPHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More" (by Kevin McArthur.

As the title suggests this book is about advanced PHP related topics, being divided into 5 parts and 21 chapters. The title enunciates the book will cover many different aspects, but you'll get disappointed as soon as you perceive it's only about 300 pages.

He jumps right in to the contents of the book - chapters on patterns, testing, documentation, the SPL, etc. His overall impression of the book was a good one, though, despite it trying to cover such a wide range of topics in "only about 300 pages".

The Pro::PHP Podcast (from php|architect) has posted its latest episode - their newscast for March 6th, 2008.

Back on track, mostly. We had to use the crappy internal mic on my laptop, but it's better than shouting to the next town over... right?

There's lots of different topics covered this time including the infamous CLA, Traits, Late Static Bindings, PHP on Windows, Drupal 6 and much more. You can either grab the show directly from the page or you can subscribe to their feed to get this and future episodes.

The Pro::PHP Podcast from php|architect has posted its latest episode - their newscast for February 29th, 2008.

We've had yet another round of technical problems with the podcast. [...] What's going on with P3?

Check out this latest episode either by downloading it directly or by subscribing to their feed and getting the latest episodes delivered right to your machine.

The Pro::PHP Podcast has released their latest episode of their newscasts - the show for January 24th, 2007.

Topics mentioned include:

• The new array syntax
• The DC PHP Conference Call for Papers
• Zend's "Zend Studio / Eclipse / PDT / Shiny / Neon"
• and Chris Shiflett's Advent Calendar

To get this latest episode, you can either download the show directly (mp3) or you can point your favorite aggregator at their feed and keep up to date.

The Pro::PHP Podcast has released their latest episode - the Newscast for December 20th, 2007.

Topics mentioned include:

• PHPCity
• Thoughts on PHP as the next Java
• The Google Charting API
• Profiling PHP applications

To grab this latest show you can either subscribe to their feed or you can just get the latest show via a direct mp3 download.

The Pro::PHP Podcast from php|architect has been posted - the newscast for December 8th, 2007.

Topics mentioned in this week's show include:

• posting of the php|tek schedule
• the release of eZ Publish 4.0.0 & eZ Flow 1.0 Released
• the Advent Calendar from Chris Shiflett
• a garbage collector patch

To get this latest episode, you can either just grab the mp3 file or you can point your feed reader at their podcast feed and get this and future episodes to keep up to date on the PHP community.

The php|architect folks have released their latest newscast episode - the one for November 22, 2007. Topics mentioned in this episode include:

• php|architect's new site
• PHP 5.2.5's release
• FastCGI and PHP
• What's coming up in PHP 5.3

As always, you can grab the latest show directly from the site or subscribe to their feed to get this and other great episodes to keep up with all of the happenings of the PHP community.