SitePoint publishing has released the Second Edition of their popular PHP Anthology book - "101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks":

Enter, The PHP Anthology a book that proves that you don't need a computer science degree to take advantage of the powerful features of PHP 5.

Save time, and eliminate the frustration of completing PHP tasks, with this comprehensive collection of ready-to-use solutions. If you're building web applications with PHP you'll never let this book out of your sight!

Authors for this edition are PHP notables Ben Balbo, Harry Fuecks, Davey Shafik, Ligaya Turmelle and Matthew Weier O'Phinney. The book covers a huge range of topics like using strings, dates and times, working with files, image manipulation and error handling.

Check out the book's main page for a link to get a free sample of the content, too! You can order the book for either $49.90 USD (PDF and hard copy), $39.95 USD for just the hard copy or $29.95 USD for the PDF copy only.

Check out some blogs from the authors: Matthew Weir O'Phinney, Davey Shafik and Ligaya Turmelle

A new post on the LooPo blog points out a handy PHP library to make and work with PDF files in PHP - Portable Document Markup Language (PDML).

I was curious how this works, as it seemed pretty different from previous similar libraries (PDFLib, FPDF), that offered a programmatic API to generate PDF DOMs instead of a markup language.

They describe how it works, what's included with the download and how it uses output buffering to get the job done as well as a few updates and further tips on its usage.

Dublish.com has this post from a little while back with some good tips on how to squeeze the most out of your MySQL and PHP scripts with some simple, handy tips.

The MySQL list includes things like:

• MySQL is interpreted from right to left so you should put the most significant limiters as far to the right as possible.
• Use indexes on the columns in the WHERE clause and on the columns you want to ORDER BY.
• Sometimes mysql_free_result() end up wasting more memory than it saves. Check the difference with memory_get_usage().
• Use NOT NULL as default value as much as you can, it speeds up execution and saves one bit.

And the PHP list includes:

• When echoing strings it's faster to separate them by comma instead of dot.
• Unset your variables to free memory, especially large arrays.
• Many code blocks might slow down the interpretation a little bit.

There's also all sorts of other tips down in the comments as well.