When I first picked up this book, I was expecting a boring, text-book approach to code examples for PHP talking with CouchDB. Boy was I wrong. What I found was a book that has you build a complete working application. And by complete, I mean you'll add the Twitter Bootstrap framework and it will be sexy.

He mentions parts of the app you'll create - a PHP framework, 3rd party libraries, working with git/github - and goes through the sections of the book, talking about good and bad points along the way. Chapters cover things like: an introduction to NoSQL, REST/HTTP verbs, installation/config of CouchDB, using version control and deploying the app using the PHPFog PaaS hosting.

Finally the new Book "CouchDB and PHP Web Development" written by Tim Juravich is ready an in my hands. It was my first experience as technical reviewer. The author contacted me by email and the editor sent me book chapters to review. Basically I gave my opinion, I test the code and I hunt for bugs. It was a great experience. Now is really cool to see the book in my hands.

Overall, he gives it a positive review (for a beginner level book) and points out a few things that can help make the reading experience better, like the "Time for Action" sections. He also was happy with the author's choice of using the Twitter Bootstrap for the interface of the sample application.

At 357 pages (375 including index), this book provides a thorough grounding in the key topics todays PHP developer should strive to know, and know well. The back cover ambitiously states that the book is "guaranteed to take your PHP skills to the next level". Keep reading to find out whether or not I agree.

She walks you through the contents of the book, noting that, despite her being an experienced developer, there were still things that she found new.

Despite the stated demographic, I think this book has a lot to offer novice developers. It would be a real challenge to properly digest and understand the wide range of topics covered, but an achievable and worthwhile one nonetheless. [...] If you're still undecided, my advice is buy the book - you won't regret it.

Cloud computing is finally reaching a point of maturity and leaving its early "hype" years behind. Ivo and Vito do a very good job of bringing the topic into a PHP developer's world in a very concise and objective manner, without leaving important platforms and concepts behind.

He briefly mentions the book's contents, both the technical and infrastructure issues it addresses, and gives a general opinion on the book and recommends it:

The book was a very pleasant read, not thick and not too thin. It helped me greatly as I prepared to give a presentation on Cloud Computing, allowing me to see different points of view as well as compare other technologies i had not had time or chance to try.

PHP5 CMS Framework Development is a 322 page book that covers all aspects of creating a full featured content management system (CMS) in PHP5. The author Martin Brampton has a history of developing extensions for the Mambo and Joomla CMS projects. He became lead developer of the CMS Mambo before starting his own CMS, Aliro. The book is split up into 14 chapters. The first is an introduction to CMS and PHP5 concepts and the remaining 13 each look at a key feature of the CMS.

The review covers the contents of the book in a bit more depth, talking about a few chapters specifically and how they felt it was overall a "great learning experience". He mentions a few negatives about the book, however - the code examples are all pulled from an existing CMS (Aliro), the conventions used in them and the heavy use of singletons. He still recommends it if you're looking to write your own CMS, though. It still provides some good insight into the methods and pieces that make them up.

Vikram has been a long-time contributor to DevZone and is the author of our most popular article series, Zend Framework, A Beginner's Guide. [...] The language is easy to read, the examples are clear and there's even a joke or two in there that will make you groan. In short, I would recommend this book to any PHP developer with a firm grasp on object oriented programming in PHP. If you are not comfortable with OOP, this is not the book for you.

He gets "the bad" of the book out of the way first mentioning the book's tendency to jump from subject to subject and how he suggests models should be in Zend Framework applications (going with Doctrine over custom models). On the good side of things, he mentions the easy to follow writing style, the very complete code examples and the "complete" feel the book has.

ModSecurity is a web application firewall. It can live in and out of the Apache web server environment, one of the most popular web servers around. ModSecurity is infinitely customizable and extremely powerful. The philosophy of ModSecurity can be summed up in a few words. Look, and only modify if I tell you to.

The author of the post (Orlanao Medina) thinks that this book is *the* resource for ModSecurity-related information, providing step-by-step information on how to work with the tool both inside and outside of Apache. It shares tips on blocking XSS attacks, brute force attacks and generally protecting your application in general.

A couple of weeks ago I received a book from PACKT Publishing titled "Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management" written by Marc Delisle, with the request if I could read it and write a review about it. Why not ? I haven't used phpMyAdmin in whole my career so I might as well read about the tool everyone around me is using. And since phpMyAdmin is also bundled with Zend Server, it can only benefit my day-to-day job.

He talks about the contents of the book (chapters on the phpMyAdmin interface, working with MySQL on the command line) and some of the handy bits of information he learned along the way.

"Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP" delivers to the readers a guided tour, which covers topics such as JavaScript libraries, Google Maps integration, Zend Framework and application design principles. In other words, it gives the reader the ability to understand and build from scratch, a full featured Web 2.0 blog application.

The review goes through each of the chapters and describes their contents and summarizes the quality of the book at the end by noting that it's really for a wide range of skill levels, not just the budding programmer.

Do not expect an advanced on PHP programming. As the author says, "this book is about PHP, but it is not about code" and "writing PHP code is only a part of the entire development life-cycle". It is definitely not about coding, neither about technical programming tricks. The book describes best practices, lessons learned, practical experiences, tools, techniques, methodologies and other related knowledge areas that all PHP professionals should follow to develop better enterprise software products.

Mauricio goes on to look at where the book fits in the development process and some of the specific chapters and what they offer to the Software Development Life Cycle process.

Despite it is difficult to focus the scope and the target public of the book writing about an area that encompasses too many topics of interest, Ivo Jansch, the author, did a great job to achieve this result with success.