Second place has been revealed in Nick Halstead's programming competition - and the 2nd place mark goes to Evan Chiu.

So second place, more drum rolls.. goes to Evan Chiu. Evan's solution revolved around a well implemented breadth first search which was wrapped up in a neat class. It was also quite well presented and the HTML was all w3c compliant.

In Evan's solution, he opted for a single "solve" method to handle the heart of the transition - an implementation of the "Breadth First Search method. If you'd like to see the full code, you can check it out here.

Giving it a second shot, Edin Kadribasic has posted another build using the new compiler from Microsoft because of some issues with the first one.

Well the first build proved to be somewhat less that a full success. It worked only on one computer: the one that was build on. Since this limits PHP use on the Windows platform I went ahead and read about Microsoft manifest files, SxS (side by side) assemblies and other wonderful stuff that Microsoft has provided for us in version 2005 of their development package.

The new build should be installable without any libraries from Microsoft and you can grab both of them directly from his site:

• php-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip
• pecl-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip

Some eZ components news as passed on by Tobias Schlitt today - they've released the second beta for this 2006 edition of the component system:

In this second beta of the eZ components 2006.2 the major highlights are the addition of a flash driver for the Graph component, the addition of many new features to the IMAP transport in the Mail component, and support for PostgreSQL and SQLite for the DatabaseSchema component.

You can get the latest information about the release here (as well as updated docs) and a full changelog for the release can be found here and the one for beta1 (with more of the 'cool features' listed) here.

On KillerSites.com, Stefan Mischook has a new book review of a new version of a good old PHP book standby - the 2nd Edition of the PHP Cookbook from O'Reilly.

The 'cookbook' series from O'Reilly press target a reader who understands (at least) the basics of a subject, these are not good books for beginners. This is the 2nd edition and covers PHP 5.

Stefan comments on the content of the book, noting that it covers "chunks" of functionality by task rather than teaching the language details behind it. He notes that this is just the book for someone needing to perform some kind of task, and just looking for the bit of code to get it done. The book also shares some helpful hints along the way, like "What is the difference between ereg and preg?"

Overall, he recommends the book, but only for those that already have a gasp on PHP and need those little code bits to make things work.

David Skalr shares some good news on the publishing front - the latest version (second edition) of the "PHP Cookbook" is rolling off the presses.

The new edition of PHP Cookbook is on the way! I got one copy yesterday, so it should be making its way into bookstores and online-bookstore-warehouses any day now.

Updates included in this edition are:

• revamped XML and OOP sections
• new PDO information
• information on testing code
• performance tuning
• regular expressions

Check out the O'Reilly page of the book for complete information.

Codewalkers.com has posted another book review, this time taking a look at Programming PHP, the 2nd edition.

Programming PHP 2nd Edition is an update in the series and has its focus on PHP 5. The book is a must have for both beginners and professionals in php programming as it takes you from the very basics of declaring functions to developing a full blown web application.

They comment that this update of a "classic" (at least in the PHP world) does a good job of both introducing the reader to the language and providing infomation on some more advanced topics, including working with graphics, XML, and PDF creation.

Wez Furlong has a quick note about an update made to one of the standards in the world of PHP books - the release of the second edition of the O'Reilly "Programming PHP" book by Rasmus Lerdorf and Kevin Tatroe and now Peter MacIntyre, Wez, and Chris Shiflett.

Rasmus Lerdorf and Kevin Tatroe provided the guidelines for this book. The newest author is Peter MacIntyre, a Zend Certified Engineer with more than five years experience in PHP. Wez Furlong and Chris Shiflett also contributed. Furlong modernized the "Extending PHP" chapter, and Shiflett brought his renowned expertise in updating the "Security" chapter.

It's definitely a welcome update in a book that several use as a "gateway" into the world of PHP (that's not a low-level "here's how to program" book). You can get more information from O'Reilly's page for the book.

In this new post on his blog today, Derick Rethans points out something that might confuse some when it comes to date/time handling - a few seconds of "lag".

Bug report #35958 must have the most obscure one ever:

"strftime usually returns a string from the number of seconds since 1 jan 1970. Now, it lags and returns a string representing 23 seconds too late."

If you know what's going on though, it isn't really that weird.

He talks about the leap seconds that have been added to keep things straight, and how that's affecting PHP's built-in date/time functionality. He also shows an example of how you can get the "more correct" time versus the normal output...