Yesterday at azPhp I gave a short presentation about the benefits of upgrading to PHP 5. The slides for cool things in php 5 are available. If you goto the single page view you can see the notes that go with the presentation, there are article links for most items giving more details.

The talk is broken up into sections - better object oriented support, better xml handling, simpler web service functionality, database libraries, user code that can work more like the core constructs and, best of all, that it's faster.

I'm hoping to improve the slides a bit and give this presentation at lots of other places. If any PHP User groups on the west coast would like me to do a presentation about PEAR drop my a line.

To help further the cause of PEAR, he's also offering the slides in an archived file for presentation anywhere.