Ever the fount of technical knowledge, Slashdot.org has posted this new book review covering the O'Reilly book "PHP Hacks" by Jack Herrington.

Given the current popularity of the Web development language PHP, it makes sense that newcomers to the language have a large number of introductory and reference volumes from which to choose. But for the more advanced PHP programmer, there are far fewer titles that explain how to make the most of the language, by applying it to solve relatively substantial problems. One such book is PHP Hacks: Tips & Tools for Creating Dynamic Websites.

They explore the contents of the book, noting that the bredth of topics covered is a bit more than they wanted to get into (and to check out the book's website for more). Overall, their review is good - the book does want it says and provides helpful and handy bits of code to help you just when you need it. There were a few technical issues they noticed, but, on the whole, it's a positive review.

In one of his latest blog entries, Justin has posted an article from Aaron Crane that talks about using PHP in large websites - some of the issues, methods, and suggestions that he's noticed over time.

The PHP scripting language has an enjoyed an enormous growth in popularity over the past few years. It benefits from being particularly easy to pick up, and from having been designed as a language specifically for producing webpages. This means that choosing PHP as your implementation language allows you to build a dynamically-generated webpage quickly and easily.

However, it is not clear how well PHP scales for use in larger commercial websites. This paper examines the issues in trying to do so.

He invesigates topics like:

• Separation of presentation from business logic
• Areas where PHP's initial simplicity can actually make things more complicated
• Using a team of developers to build a site

For each item, he looks in detail about what the topic is and how a manage/develoeper can get a handle on it. There are good and bad sides to all, but finding the right balance is key.

On Jim Plush's blog today, there's a new post as a follow up to his previous post concerning the Zend Encoder and some issues with sites that can decode its files.

I made a post on the Zend Forums asking for a statement on the decoding of Zend Encoded files.

Notice how there is NO MESSAGE. Why would they delete the text of my forum post? I was asking for a statement and a patch fix for a list of sites offering the decoding of encoded files. Is Zend trying to sweep this under the rug because they're looking to dump the encoder project and don't want to waste any money on fixing this issue? This doesn't look good for Zend PR.

It's definitely interesting to see that they removed the post - not just replied with a simple "We're looking into it" or "We're aware of the situation. Thank you for your input" kind of thing. Instead, they take the "what forum post?" approach. Well, Jim's posted another message that, as of the writing of this post, is still there, but unanswered...