David Goodwin has posted a new book review of a PHP book offered by Packt Publishing (released Sept 22, 2007) - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects" by Shu-Wai Chow.

Some time ago, Packt publishing sent me this book to review. Here it is, being somewhat overdue!

He talks about the book's contents - the different chapters detailing the different services' APIs, the protocols that are used to talk to those services and the data formats your scripts would have to be able to talk in to communicate. He recommends the book to those looking to get started with mashups specifically, but warns that in some places the book tends to "reinvent the wheel" rather than using classes/packages that already exist.

Ken Guest has posted a book review today of an offering from Packt Publishing, Learning Facebook Application Development (by Hasin Hayder and Dr Mark Alexander Bain).

The book was published prior to Facebook's facelift but this doesn't really impact on the usefulness of the book. An overview of FBML, FQL, FBJS (a restricted subset of JavaScript and enforced for security reasons) are given along with information on how to use the test consoles, publish to news feeds, some multimedia aspects of what can be done in Facebook applications and more.

He notes that the book focuses on a PHP5-only world for developing the apps and opts for MySQL as the database of choice. Overall, he found it useful - more so than the online documentation, especially for beginners.

Doug Brown has posted a new review of a book by Michael Kimsal, the "PHP Job Hunter's Handbook" (from php|architect publishing).

Michael Kimsal's new book, PHP Job Hunter's Handbook. I pre-ordered this book a few months ago, and read the PDF version all the way through before I received my hard copy. [...] It wouldn't be extreme to go as far as saying that the book covers too much territory, but for it only being 106 pages, it's a fair conclusion.

Doug lists some of these topics (like how to find a full-time job, contracting, freelancing and some advice from other developers/those on the hiring side). He looks at what it does have and doesn't have as well as his recommendation on if you should buy it or not.

PHPClasses.org has posted a review of a recently released book from No Starch Press, "Wicked Cool PHP: Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems".

n the PHP development life-cycle everyone faces common problems. Considering this, No Starch Press came with a good book named "Wicked Cool PHP: Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems" written by William Steinmetz and Brian Ward. Wicked Cool PHP is a wide collection of complete PHP scripts that solve specific problems frequently encountered by PHP coders. The book contains 12 chapters covering 76 frequently encountered problems.

He goes through each chapter, mentioning what its about and any extra tidbits it might include. There's wide range of topics covered - everything from the basics of configuring PHP out to security and user/session tracking.

Jonathan Street has posted a review of a book from Quentin Zervaas - "Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP".

If you are already comfortable taking a project from concept to a working application this book will have little for you. If you are comfortable working with PHP, able to put together standalone tools and pages, perhaps develop a wordpress plugin but have not yet created a complete site from scratch then this may be the book that helps you "step up a gear".

He mentions the application that he book helps you develop (a blogging platform) and goes through a summary of each chapter with opinions on each. He also points to a sample chapter if you'd like an idea of what the book is like.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new post today, a book review of the Sams Publishing book "Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer's Guide" (by Peter MacIntyre and Iam Morse).

My buddy Pete MacIntyre has been after me to review his book for some time now and honest Pete, it's been sitting on my desk since it arrived patiently awaiting my attention. So last night I broke down and went through it. I'll have to say I was impressed with what I saw.

He (the reviewer, Cal) notes that, while the book comes in at about 180 pages - light for a tech book these days - to still gives a great overview of the technology for those already familiar with the Eclipse setup.

The Zend Developer Zone has a review posted of a report that the O'Reilly Radar group put out concerning Open Source software and its place in the Enterprise business today.

It's not often that a report generates this much excitement but "Open Source in the Enterprise" says a lot of what needs to be said to C-Levels considering making the jump to Open Source.

Cal mentions one of the 6 factors that are driving more and more businesses to open source software (like PHP) - the community that surrounds them (how vibrant is it?). He also points out the concept of "vendor lock-in" and how open source can help companies accomplish it by ridding themselves of proprietary software. The report can be gotten from the O'Reilly Radar group for $399 for an individual copy or $995 for a sitewide license.

The PHPClasses.org website has posted a new review of CodeGear's latest version of Delphi for PHP.

A new version of Delphi for PHP IDE was released this year. It is a follow-up of Delphi for PHP 1.0 released for the first time in 2007.

Manuel already reviewed a previous version of the software, so he only really focuses on the differences. He spends time reintroducing what Delphi is and how it plays a role in a PHP developers experience before getting into the new functionality. New features like third-party library support, how to run the software on other platforms (like Linux or OS X) and several of the updates to the user interface itself.

On the Ibuildings blog there's a quick new post from Joni Overbosch looking at Ivo Jansch's recently released new book, php|architect's Guide to Enterprise PHP Development.

Last year he confided in me, said he wanted to write a book. And he actually did, within the year, 275 pages describing the complete development life cycle. For each phase in the development cycle, Ivo describes the common pitfalls, ways to get around them and tools others use to keep things running smoothly.

You can find out more about the book on its website including a link to order a copy of your very own ($36 CAD for print and PDF, $32 CAD for just the PDF).

Brian DeShong has posted some of his "food for thought" on the development process that's behind the scenes of different PHP applications.

Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking on development processes and quality, specifically for large-scale, professional PHP-based projects. [...] Generally speaking, my perception is that software development shops that really care about and emphasize quality have processes that consist of things such as writing use cases, unit testing and continuous integration.

He knows how he feels about all of this, be he wants to hear back from the community. How far does quality assurance go in your group? What kind of time/funding does this involve? Leave him a comment and let him know...