Volker Dusch has a new tongue-in-cheek post to his site talking about a few pieces of useful software that are not written in PHP...and why not?

Dear PHP Community, we need to have a talk about the insufferable state of your software stacks. It was recently brought to my attention that there is software out there, software we use every day!, that is NOT written in PHP. This is completely unacceptable! We are PHPeople! We’re not “Web” Developers, we are the web. And we sure as hell are not some fancy “Software Developer”, you can ask anyone on the internet! Seriously: If it’s not PHP how will we ever be able to extend and adapt it to our needs! We are slaves of our tools!

He mentions several tools that, yes, while not written in PHP are very useful to just about any developer out there (including git, Puppet and Apache). But, more seriously:

PHP is a language that enables absolute beginners to start creating on the web using FTP and notepad! It let’s us realize and validate our ideas blazingly fast and allows us to adapt our successful ideas to beautifully scale with our requirements providing and relying on solid, battle-proof tools.

On his blog, Padraic Brady has this post on a topic that's arisen from the PHP Developer's Network forums - the idea of creating a community-built book surrounding PHP.

The PHP Developer's Network forums were abuzz today after a member's proposal to write a community PHP book for novice programmers, with sections targeting advanced topics and programmers. The instigator was d11wtq (Chris Corbyn), who on a side note recently released the excellent Swift Mailer library. It's a simple proposal - write a book, and release it in some (or many) formats for free.

So why write yet another PHP book? I think the proposal caught such attention because of the method of writing and the motivation for doing so. And admit it, it's a very intriguing idea.

He talks more about how the book would be created ("a community sourced effort") and how quality of the content would be maintained. Creative freedom would also be engouraged, and some motivations as to why a developer would want to contribute to the book at all.

On his blog, Padraic Brady has this post on a topic that's arisen from the PHP Developer's Network forums - the idea of creating a community-built book surrounding PHP.

The PHP Developer's Network forums were abuzz today after a member's proposal to write a community PHP book for novice programmers, with sections targeting advanced topics and programmers. The instigator was d11wtq (Chris Corbyn), who on a side note recently released the excellent Swift Mailer library. It's a simple proposal - write a book, and release it in some (or many) formats for free.

So why write yet another PHP book? I think the proposal caught such attention because of the method of writing and the motivation for doing so. And admit it, it's a very intriguing idea.

He talks more about how the book would be created ("a community sourced effort") and how quality of the content would be maintained. Creative freedom would also be engouraged, and some motivations as to why a developer would want to contribute to the book at all.