While not directly related to PHP and its community, several potential technical book authors out there will probably be affected by this. The popular publishing platform, Leanpub, has announced a change in their pricing to create new books with the service.

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors. This platform is the combination of two things: a publishing workflow and a storefront. Leanpub is more than the sum of its parts, however – by combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks, it’s something different.

[...] Our workflow is flexible. Authors can use our simple in-browser editor or upload completed ebook files, but most choose to write their manuscripts on their own computers, using either plain text (formatted using Markdown or Markua markup) or Word documents. [...] Our storefront is an elegant way to sell in-progress or completed ebooks. [...] Our royalty rate is better than Amazon’s and Apple’s royalty rates for any book over $2.99, and it is far better than Amazon’s royalty rate for books over $10.

[...] Today we are changing the pricing of Leanpub. Until now, Leanpub has been totally free for authors to use. [...] Going forward, it will cost money to create a new Leanpub book. Here’s the cost: $99 per book.

Previously the only charges were a percentage of the sales for books on the storefront but moving forward, there will be a flat $99 USD cost for new books created wth the service (in addition to the same royalty rate as before). This helps to fund this great service and keep the level of quality authors have enjoyed so far. More details about the changes for new books and the "grandfathering" of current books can be found on this pricing page.

On the CodeBlog they've posted a review of a recent release from Packt Publishing about using the FuelPHP framework for beginners.

I’ve been playing around with FuelPHP for a while and despite the fact that I haven’t used it in production, it has been on my watch list ever since I first saw it. When I saw the new book about FuelPHP by Ross Tweedie, I was eager to read it – here’s my feedback about. If you just want to buy the book, you can get it at Amazon or directly from Packt Publishing.

The review looks at each chapter and provides an overview of its contents (seven of them). It also talks some about the target audience for the book - intermediate to advanced PHP developers wanting to learn more about the framework. To be clear, this is not an "introduction to PHP" book too. He points out some of the "bads" about the book including major concepts being explained too high-level and confusion about what exactly to do in certain steps of the process.

Should I read this book? It depends on your background – I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re a PHP programmer who hasn’t worked with namespaces, databases before. [...] I’d definitely recommend to book if you worked with other frameworks like CodeIgniter, Yii, Zend .. before and now want to have a look at FuelPHP. You’ll get a good impression about its possibilities!

Brandon Savage has posted the second article in his RabbitMQ+PHP series today with a look at publishing messages to the queue. (Part one is here)

Now that we understand the basics behind RabbitMQ, it’s time for us to start working with it. The first step in working with RabbitMQ is to begin sending messages to the exchange so that they can be queued. In RabbitMQ parlance, the “producer” is responsible for “publishing” the messages to the exchange.

He includes the code you'll need to use the AMQP PHP extension to connect with the RabbitMQ server and select a channel. He also shows how to set up an "exchange" and "queue" and bind them to each other. Finally, there's the one line of code that uses the routing key value to push a message into the waiting service.

On the AjaxRay site today there's a new review of an introductory book from Packt Publishing about unofficial wiki is a BIG try to help in this issue. Besides, recently Packt has published the first book on Kohana “Kohana 3.0 Beginner’s Guide“. Jason D. Straughan wrote this book for Kohana version 3.x.

The review includes an overall assessment of the book, a detailed description of how the chapters are laid out and some of the complaints he had about the book's contents - a lack of code examples in some places, demos/screenshots pointing out what the framework can really do and the inclusion of some deprecated methods.

Overall, the book is well organized, focused and will be helpful on it’s purpose. I felt it’s capable to teach Kohana to a new guy, in a smooth way. Yes, there have some printing mistakes, old (because they are changed in new version) function use and some other minor issues, but seems ignorable to me. I’d recommend it for Kohana beginners.

php|architect Magazine has officially announced the introduction of a new publishing format for their magazine. Readers are no longer tied to just PDF versions - they can now opt for ePUB editions of the magazine starting with this month's issue (and retroactively!).

Still, even though PDF was a less popular format in 2002 than it has become today, it was a much easier choice for us when the only way to read an electronic publication was to sit in front of a computer. The advent of portable e-book readers demanded that we consider other formats; as a result, about six months ago we started a skunkworks program, spearheaded by our very own Keith Casey, to create ePub and MOBI versions of our magazine.

Thanks to an ePUB document generator, the magazine can now be dynamically generated into three formats - the usual PDF file, an ePUB edition and a MOBI edition for the Kindle fans out there. All subscribers have been upgraded to this plan - the Premium subscription - and are able to start pulling down these editions today.

Michelangelo van Dam has posted a new book review today about an offering from from Packt Publishing - CMS Design Using PHP and jQuery.

After receiving the book I started reading it. But right from the start the author displayed bad practices and mis-use of PHP. Reading the book from front to back, the author Kae Verens (@kae_verens) has confronted me with bad use of variables (like $a, $b, $c), bad use of PHP structures and a complete wrong approach of using JavaScript, where JavaScript should enrich an application instead of incorporating business logic.

In his "good" category fell things like the interesting variety of jQuery plugins mentioned and how the CMS example was broken up into easily digestible chunks. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the book falls into his "bad" and "ugly" category" including the structure of the application, the quality of the code and the lack of filtering/validation that was done on input.

On PHPClasses.org there's a recent book review of a new offering from Wrox Publishing - "Expert PHP and MySQL" (by Andrew Curioso, Ronald Bradford, Patrick Galbraith). Udi Mosayev is the reviewer.

This book is for developers who have worked on several projects and have some good experience developing with PHP and MySQL, as well developers who develop high-demand applications or applications that handle lots of data and processing. OOP experience is recommended.

He talks about the subjects he specifically likes that the book covers like opcode caching, general caching techniques, Gearman and memcached.

The techniques discussed in this book are used by large sites that we all know like Digg, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube and more. If its good for them, I believe it is good for you too.

Lorna Mitchell has posted a review she's done of the Packt Publishing book "RESTful PHP Web Services" (by Samisa Abeysinghe).

Overall it was well-written (with only as many spelling mistakes as any other PHP book) and clearly organised. [...] Very few services that claim to be RESTful actually are, which makes writing anything along these lines very tricky, however I did feel the author could have been clearer about why having a single URL and a parameter for which action should be performed, doesn't fit well. We do get a sense of excitement about services as ways to "glue together" bits of data on the net, and the possibilities of exposing and consuming information in this way.

She talks about the quality of the technical content (including the "very thorough" non-framework examples and Zend Framework example) and some of the extra baggage she felt it could do without - specifically the overhead that adding the Zend Framework could add.

On the Ibuildings blog today Marcello Duarte has a new review of the Packt Publishing book "PHP5 CMS Framework Development" (by Martin Brampton).

Martin left Mambo (before they announced to drop support for PHP4 last September) to write his own CMS and "evolve out of the Mambo history", by taking advantage of PHP5 OO enhancements. The result is Aliro: a CMS, a framework and an extension project with traits and genes of the Mambo family. Aliro code is used throughout the book to support and illustrate his presentation.

Topics of the different chapters include basic CMS system needs, organizing code, extensions and editing and presenting content.

Stoyan has once again been tasked with helping Packt Publishing find the best open-source PHP CMS for 2008:

It's that time of the year again. Time to cast my vote as part of the jury in Packt's open-source awards, category "PHP CMS".

He includes some of the criteria he'll be using to judge based on including the list of features it includes, how quality is the code, what sort of state the documentation is in and how much of a community it has around it.