The NETTUTS website has posted a top ten list of things from the PHP masters out there, a few words of wisdom to live by. Here's the list along with the authors of each:

• Use PHP Only When You Need it - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Use Many Tables With PHP and MYSQL for Scalability - Matt Mullenweg
• Never, ever trust your users - Dave Child
• Invest in PHP Caching - Ben Balbo
• Speed up PHP Development with an IDE, Templates and Snippets - Chad Kieffer
• Make Better Use of PHP's Filter Functions - Joey Sochacki
• Use a PHP Framework - Josh Sharp
• Don't use a PHP Framework - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Use Batch Processing - Jack D. Herrington
• Turn on Error Reporting Immediately - David Cummings

Some of them are conflicting, but that just means that you'll have to do what you've always done - take advice with a grain of salt and ultimately decide what's best for you and your application.

Nick Halstead is conducting a poll of his own to try to figure out who the online community thinks are the "Top 10 Programmers of All Time".

My original list was based upon my programming background and was purely my own opinion and I did not expect everyone to agree with it. What I thought I would do this time round was to give everyone a chance to voice their opinion. [...] have pre-filled 18 programmers from my original list plus those that were suggested in the comments.

You can vote on a wide range of developers, including several PHP-associated once like Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski.

The Zend Developer Zone (with Cal Evans currently at OSCON) spotlights George Schlossnagle's talk, "High Performance PHP".

George Schlossnagle gave a talk on "High Performance PHP" which was very good. At OmniTI, George works with a lot of different clients helping them resolve bottlenecks and squeeze the most out of their applications. This experience along with the collective knowledge of OmniTI gives him unique insight into ways to speed up PHP applications. I only got to sit in on a small portion of his session but even so, I was able to get some good tips.

Cal opts for more of an overview than a summary (the talk/session was about 3.5 hours long), so he includes the "10 Best Practices" George shared to help the performance of your applications.

Included in the list are:

• Control your include trees to no more than 10 includes
• Be mindful of how you use other network resources
• Output buffering and compression are good.
• Profile early, profile often.

Cameron Olthuis wants to share the tools that he finds th emost useful with the entire web, so he's posted them here on his blog.

His list includes libraries from all different technologies, not just PHP. Several are Javascript-related, but it's always good to have a complete toolkit on hand when trying to tackle some of the more difficult things.

Included in his list are things like:

• Moo.fx - a Javascript effects library
• Swat - an open source web application toolkit
• PEAR - the PHP package repository
• Mochikit - lightweight Javascript library

Be sure to check out the post and its comments for more great resources!