The prolific Michael McLauglin just sent me a copy of his other new book "Oracle Database AJAX & PHP Web Application Development", co-written with Lee Barney.

The book looks at how to build "faster, lighter and more responsive Web applications while reducing code support and creation time". There's chapters on scalability, the basics of Ajax, PDO and multimodel communications.

Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management by Marc Delisle is the third edition of this book, and it follows the usual pattern of Packt Publishing books. The book has clearly defined objectives on the cover, and it follows a clear progression of its chosen subject from start to end. It is well presented, with a clear layout and clean page design that makes it easy to read.

Stuart gives a high-level overview of both phpMyAdmin ("it feels like phpMyAdmin as been around forever") and the book with an index of the topics covered.

Packt Publishing recently sent me a couple of books to review, so let's start with Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder. According to the introduction, the book is intended for beginners to intermediate PHP5 programmers and the first chapter has a good introduction to what object oriented programming is and why you would want to use it.

He glosses over the first few chapters of the book (introductory stuff mostly) and points out three others specifically - Chapter 5 covering reflection and unit testing, Chapter 6 covering the SPL and Chapter 9 dealing with SimpleXML and DOM.

Packt Publishing recently sent me a couple of books to review. This post is about the second one I received, Learning PHP Data Objects by Dennis Popel. I was excited to receive this book as PDO underlies a lot of the Zend_Db_Adapter objects that I use in my day to day programming. It seemed like a good idea that I should know more about it.

He provides some good detail of what the book covers (chapter by chapter) as well as a summary including his recommendation for who should use the book and how they can best enjoy its contents.

Putting the aspects of Hayder's grasp of the English language aside, the book is rather good as an introduction to the various technologies that it covers.

He points out a few things of note - the beginner OOP chapters (only made for the newbies out there), the contents of the main OOP chapter and the good section on PHPUnit and unit testing. He also has a few suggestions of things that could make the book a bit better, including a personal suggestion on code formating and braces.

This book is a tutorial guide to Joomla! 1.5. It was written and published during the development of Joomla! 1.5. It is intended for Web developers, designers, Web masters, content editors and marketing professionals. It is suitable for anyone starting out with Joomla! 1.5, for people who upgrade to Joomla! 1.5, and for those who just want have a good printed manual at hand.

R.L. (the reviewer) goes through some of the chapters, detailing their content including some of the software mentioned in them (like Fireboard and DOCman). He recommends the book to anyone looking for a good in-hand Joomla! resource but notes that a chapter on security would have been a nice addition.

We're happy to announce the upcoming release of php|architect's Guide to Programming Magento, the first comprehensive guide for developers who want to learn more about the Magento e-commerce platform.

The book, by Mark Kimsal shows you how to install and successfully deploy a Magento installation on your website. The preorder is available right now for a 15% discount and the full PDF version will be released on May 15th, 2008 (print on May 31st). Check out the product page for more information and to reserve your copy today.

In short, my review is this: overall, the book detailed everything I can think of (and more) about phpMyAdmin - I learned about some features in phpMyAdmin that I was not already aware of. I would ask for less screenshots, more how-tos and less 3rd-person speech for the next revision, but if there are any questions I have about phpMyAdmin, the answer is in this book.

The review gets into more detail about the book - its structure, the wealth of content in it (including some unknown features) and a few things that could have been better. Kae mentions a few places where the author "forgets that the reader does not know the subject" and gets a bit too technical too fast. The screenshots, while good in moderation, overpowered parts of the chapters and made them harder to follow.

For about 6 months now, I've been itching to write a book on the PHP Streams Layer - one of my favorite features of PHP; and also one of the least known considering it's powerful abilities.

He describes his goal simply as this: to create the definitive resource for working with the streams later in PHP. It should be out sometime in the third quarter of 2008, so keep your eye out for it then.

If you are new to PHP or are thinking of moving to PHP form other language then the following list of books will provide you with the required knowledge to become a seasoned PHP programmer. Of course, the list is subjective and you may have a different list of books in mind.

Their list is made up of:

• Zend PHP5 Certification
• PHP in Action
• PHP and MySQL Web Development
• PEAR
• PHP Cookbook
• SQL for MySQL Developers