As Freek Van der Herten mentions in his latest post to his site, the videos for all of the sessions at this year's Laracon EU conference have been posted on their official YouTube channel.

This year’s Laracon EU was an amazing conference. The venue was astonishing, there were lots of cool talks and interesting people to talk to. If you’re using Laravel or PHP going to this conference really is a no brainer.

If you were unable to attend or want to see the talk you missed during the conference you can now do so. The organisers have uploaded video’s of all talks to their YouTube channel.

Freek talks briefly about his presentation (covering backups in Laravel applications) and mentions some of the future plans for the backup package that he's created to make it simpler. Other sessions that were presented at the conference also included:

• Evan You - Modern Frontend with Vue.js
• Franz Liedke - Web accessibility for Artisans
• Frank de Jonge - One Box Doesn't fit all
• Geshan Manander - Embrace chatops, stop installing deployment software

The full playlist can be found on the Laracon Youtube channel.

php[architect] Magazine has just published their latest issue for July 2016: Harnessing Magic. This latest issue features articles like:

• "RegEx is Your Friend" (Liam Wiltshire)
• "Removing the Magic with Functional PHP" (David Corona)
• "Implementing Cryptography" (Edward Barnard)
• "Reference Counting : The PDO Case Study" (Gabriel Zerbib)

There's also all of the usual columns from some of the regular authors, the "Education Station", "Community Corner" and the "Security Corner". If you're interested in the content but just want a sample, be sure to check out this month's free article covering mailing lists and MailChimp. You can pick up either just this issue or a full year subscription directly from the php[architect] website.

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.

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.