On the Symfony blog there's a new post about the Symfony Live Portland schedule being published:

We have finally selected all the great speakers that will share their experience with the Framework with you at Symfony Live Portland 2013. We had a very hard time choosing among all the excellent talks' proposals we received. After a long time of thinking, we are very pleased to publish the talks we think you most want to attend for this edition. For the first time in the USA, there will be 2 tracks per day; more than 20 talks are scheduled, a lightning talk session and the now famous Jeopardy session with the fantastic Jeremy Mikola! Let's say that it will be now your turn to have a hard time choosing among these great talks! Have a look now at the schedule and register to the conference!

They also mention the availability of the Symfony certification and that they're still looking for sponsors for this year's event. You can register now and pick up tickets for about $400 USD ($600 for the Combo pass).

Chris Hartjes (aka the "Grumpy Programmer") has written a second book that aims to teach you even more about writing testable applications. Where his first book taught the basics of making apps testable, this new book - The Grumpy Programmer's PHPUnit Cookbook provides code examples showing how to solve some of the common problems you'll come across when testing your applications.

You know you need something better, but time just doesn't seem to be on your side. Making things "right" is costly and you need to deliver working code NOW. Tests would be great but there are real deadlines to meet. You can't stop development and churn away for hours just to add tests around what you know already works. [...] No longer would you dread the bug reports. You'd happily make changes knowing that your safety net is there. You'd try out new features guiding yourself with tests.

The book covers some more advanced topics than you might have seen in the previous book including data providers, test doubles, faking test data (or using external sources) and writing tests for APIs, databases and exceptions. If this sounds interesting to you, you can pick up your own copy of the book on his site (or try out the sample first).

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.

Brandon Savage has officially released his book, "Do This, Not That" - a book targeted at beginners to the PHP language, trying to teach them best practices for some of the most common situations they might come across.

Too many books on best practices read like a manual. They are dry, boring and cover topics that you don't care about. "Do This, Not That" is different. A collection of essays, it highlights those areas for which best practices are either not well known or not well defined. It offers clear solutions that will be easy to implement. I've taken the time to research and identify what I feel are the best practices, and condensed it into a two hour read that will leave you feeling empowered, not exhausted.

If this sounds interesting to you, you can pick up a copy on the official site for about $30 USD and, if you're more of a try-before-you-buy sort, you can read a sample chapter covering type hinting.

On the CodeIgniter blog there's a new announcement about a book published from one of the main CodeIgniter developers (Jaime Rumbelow) - the second volume in the CI Handbook series.

Earlier this year I wrote and released The CodeIgniter Handbook - Vol. 1 - Who Needs Ruby? to critical acclaim. It's been several months since the release of Volume One and everybody's support, feedback and enthusiasm has been absolutely wonderful. To everyone who has purchased a copy, thank you. I'm thrilled to announce that Vol. 2 - API Design, was released last week and is now available to purchase in PDF or Paperback.

This new book covers API design and how you can make your app "connected" in an automated world. If you'd like to pick up a copy of this new book, you can get one from efendi books.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today there's a new video posted of a discussion between several of the published authors that were in attendance at the Dutch PHP Conference 2010 for a few questions.

Here's a video from the Dutch PHP Conference 2010, where we pulled together some of the published technical authors at the event (many of them speakers) and asked them a few questions about books, writing, and getting published. Here's what they had to say...

Authors included Cal Evans, Ivo Jansch, Rob Allen, Derick Rethans and Kevlin Henney who offer some of their tips on getting published and writing a book for yourself.

Ivo Jansch has posted about the official release of his book hot from php|architect's presses, the Guide to Enterprise PHP Development.

It's true that it's one of the few books that's not about PHP code, but about the entire development life cycle. I owe a lot of thanks to Elizabeth Naramore and Marco Tabini of php|architect, for getting this book out. If you order the book, also check out its companion website. I will collect feedback on that site, and will regularly post errata or other updates.

Get more information (and grab yourself a copy) from the php|architect website - the print/PDF will cost about $30 CAD and the PDF only runs about $27 CAD.

Stefan Mischook points out in this new post on the KillerPHP blog about an article he has published in the latest edition of the Web Designer Magaizne covering the creation of a contact form in PHP (a beginner look at working with forms and sendmail).

You can find out more about the magazine and the other contents of the issue from their website.

As he (Aaron Wormus) mentions in this new blog posting, the PEAR book from Packt publsihing has officially been released.

This is a collaboration between Stoyan Stefanov, Stephan Schmidt, Carsten Lucke and me. The original book was conceived way back at IPC2k4 so it's been in the pipeline for a while now.

Aaron talks about the contents of the book too - the different aspects of programming with PEAR with a more "solution-based" perspective (versus just dumping all of the information in your lap and shoving you out the door). He's also created an unofficial community wiki for the book to give things like reviews, comments, and other book-related things a place to live.

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.