Too many books on best practices read like a manual. They are dry, boring and cover topics that you don't care about. "Do This, Not That" is different. A collection of essays, it highlights those areas for which best practices are either not well known or not well defined. It offers clear solutions that will be easy to implement. I've taken the time to research and identify what I feel are the best practices, and condensed it into a two hour read that will leave you feeling empowered, not exhausted.

If this sounds interesting to you, you can pick up a copy on the official site for about $30 USD and, if you're more of a try-before-you-buy sort, you can read a sample chapter covering type hinting.

This great series of highly focused e-books will offer tips, tricks and best practices focused on core areas of PHP development, including databases, security, filtering, regular expressions, configuration and more. Since it will be a series of tightly targeted solutions, developers will be able to pick all, some or just one of the offerings that solves their specific problem(s).

This excerpt looks at private method use in your applications and why they could be considered "evil" if not used correctly.