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.

As quoted from the LWN review of the book:

Open Advice is a book that will be helpful to those who are new to FOSS, but, because of the individual voices, styles, and tones, it doesn't read like a "how to". It could even be recommended to those who aren't necessarily interested in contributing, but are curious about what this "free software thing" is all about.

It contains real experience from real developers that work on FOSS projects with chapters titled:

• "Code First"
• "University and Community"
• "Love the Unknown"
• "Quality Assurance"
• "Good Manners Matter"
• "Stop Worrying and Love the Crowd"

The book is licensed under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA) and can be downloaded in multiple formats - ePub, mobi, PDF and paperback, if you prefer that.

Just a quick note that the Best Practices forum is now open and already has a couple of fast and easy articles in it for your viewing pleasure. For any aspiring writers - there is also a list of future articles if you want to try your hand at it.

There's already a few articles posted including ones discussing PHPDocumentor, spaghetti code, and variable abuse.

Some of the topics touched on this week include:

• the "Five Best Next Generation PHP Frameworks" article
• "The Evolution of PHP on the Internet" - Nexen.net's latest stats
• comparing mod_php and FastCGI
• the announcement of "Baking Day" from the CakePHP group
• and several of the new PEAR/PECL/Zend Framework updates from the week

Of course, this list only touches briefly on all of the happenings this week, so check out the full list on their site.

So far, he's already gathered a few - two from Pxy, one from Stanford, and another from the Secure Systems Lab (at the Technical University of Vienna).