The Laravel News site has a post today linking to five handy resources you can use to learn about the Laravel IoC (inversion of control, dependency injection) container.

The Laravel IoC container is a powerful tool for managing class dependencies. It is widely used in Laravel and an important tool for your arsenal. The community has created several tutorials for this and here are five resources that will teach you all about it. [...] By reading these tutorials you’ll be up to speed in no time on the Laravel IoC container and also improve your code by implementing it in your application.

As a "bonus" there's also a link to a video narrated by Laravel creator Taylor Otwell himself about the IoC container and its use.

On the Dreamincode.com forum there's an interesting approach mentioned for security login forms from brute-force attacks using a queueing system rather than the usual real-time requests.

Login forms in online systems are often easy targets for brute-force attacks; attacks designed to go through all possible values (or at least all probable values) for a password to "guess" a correct one. Securing your forms from such attacks is important, but it can be tricky to do in an effective manner without adversely affecting the user experience of your normal user. The method I am suggesting in this article is that of queuing login attempts in an effort to limit how many attempts an attacker can execute per second. [...] So, how do we implement this in PHP?

He suggests using a MySQL-based queueing system (but it could easily be replaced with one of the *MQ types) that tracks users versus login attempts. He's put together a library that handles the storage and login attempt management. He takes some time to explain the functionality of the class and how to put it to use.

In response to some of the "problem with PHP" posts that have been circulating lately, Anthony Ferrara has posted about the "true problem" with PHP - less about the language, more about the community.

The core of the PHP community is filled with a lot of really talented and smart developers doing some really amazing things. But on the fringes, there are a lot of people who are writing articles, tutorials, and posts designed to help beginners learn the language (and usually how to program). The problem with this is that the majority of those authors frankly don't have a clue what they are talking about.

He talks about why this is a problem (bad practices promoted, bad code) and what you, as a PHP developer, can do about it...and maybe help in creating a separate tutorials site with content "approved" to provide good practices and quality code.

If you're looking for a way to give back to the PHP community, there's plenty of ways - one of which could be writing for PHPFreaks.com.

We have decided to give people the chance to write tutorials and blog posts for PHP Freaks. [...] You'll be writing about things that are of general interest to PHP developers and you will be writing tutorials for people who are learning about PHP at any level (i.e. from beginner tutorials to advanced topics). We would rather have tutorials that teach programming/coding concepts or theory than specific things, such as a blog.

You'll need to request membership and join the "Authors" group to get started. Check out their list of other criteria you'll need to match too.

There's always lots of happenings each week in the PHP community, and sometimes a weekly summary is a good way to keep up with them all. Wolfgang Drews has put together such a summary for last week with plenty of details and links.

Thinking about what might be of interest to you readers out there, I came up with the idea to summarize what happend last week in phpworld. it's quite interesting that there were some summaries of most relevant mailingslists around at Zend - and that there is a new weekly summary for the Zend framework, but no one ever made a weekly digest of what was relevant in phpworld "the last week". So, all you readers out there, tell me if you like it, then there will be some continuation...

Some of the items mentioned include the release of PHP 5.1.3RC2, Thomas Boutell's move away from developing the GD library for PHP, and several new tutorials.

There's always lots of happenings each week in the PHP community, and sometimes a weekly summary is a good way to keep up with them all. Wolfgang Drews has put together such a summary for last week with plenty of details and links.

Thinking about what might be of interest to you readers out there, I came up with the idea to summarize what happend last week in phpworld. it's quite interesting that there were some summaries of most relevant mailingslists around at Zend - and that there is a new weekly summary for the Zend framework, but no one ever made a weekly digest of what was relevant in phpworld "the last week". So, all you readers out there, tell me if you like it, then there will be some continuation...

Some of the items mentioned include the release of PHP 5.1.3RC2, Thomas Boutell's move away from developing the GD library for PHP, and several new tutorials.

Over on PHPMac.com today, there's two new beginner tutorials posted - an Introduction to PHP and Writing Form Data to a MySQL Database using PHP.

The intro tutorial starts at the very beginning, showing you how to put PHP code in your HTML pages. They show how to use variables and echo statement to make some simple output.

In the MySQL/Form tutorial, they assume that you have a bit of experience with PHP under your belt (though it's nothing a little searching through the manual couldn't fix). They create a form/script combo that checks to make sure you've entered in information and then, on submit, creates the correct SQL to put it into the database.

Neither of them include anything on installation, so you'll have to either set it up yourself or have a host that already has it installed to work on - though it's pretty easy to find those these days...

Over on PHPMac.com today, there's two new beginner tutorials posted - an Introduction to PHP and Writing Form Data to a MySQL Database using PHP.

The intro tutorial starts at the very beginning, showing you how to put PHP code in your HTML pages. They show how to use variables and echo statement to make some simple output.

In the MySQL/Form tutorial, they assume that you have a bit of experience with PHP under your belt (though it's nothing a little searching through the manual couldn't fix). They create a form/script combo that checks to make sure you've entered in information and then, on submit, creates the correct SQL to put it into the database.

Neither of them include anything on installation, so you'll have to either set it up yourself or have a host that already has it installed to work on - though it's pretty easy to find those these days...