It's true that it's one of the few books that's not about PHP code, but about the entire development life cycle. I owe a lot of thanks to Elizabeth Naramore and Marco Tabini of php|architect, for getting this book out. If you order the book, also check out its companion website. I will collect feedback on that site, and will regularly post errata or other updates.

Get more information (and grab yourself a copy) from the php|architect website - the print/PDF will cost about $30 CAD and the PDF only runs about $27 CAD.

Are you a sophisticated PHP developer, or a newbie? Either way, you need to make the best of your resources, be they people delivering projects, or hardware serving your customers. Take this opportunity to learn from the industry experts the importance of PHP best practices.

Ivo will be talking PHP in the Enterprise - how good developers are hard to find, keeping code up and running well and how important scalability is to you and your business.

If you would like to attend, you can find contact information at the bottom of this page.

So, in the digital toolbox of the developer, where has PHP been designed to work best? And where is it, perhaps, not the best tool for the job? [...] While other languages can surely be used to solve The Web Problem, in this article I explain why PHP is the premier solution for server-side Web scripting.

John talks about how PHP was written for the web, how it approaches and handles web requests, the security of the language and some of the major software packages that are being used in PHP development today (like the Zend Framework, PHPUnit and PECL extensions).

The article, "You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!", covers the basics of the language - its status in the web programming world, the functionality it offers and the database interfaces it includes. They also include a hit list of reasons PHP is popular and why it's a good choice for your project.

Then things get a little strange - they move from their PHP praise to three things that have more to do with unresearched "facts" than the reality of the language:

• Security and PHP
• Working with PHP and the shell
• Scaling and PHP (in enterprise environments)

These incorrect assumptions have lead to many comments both from the PHP community and from users of other languages (like Java and ColdFusion) sharing thoughts on the contents of the article and the language in general. Check out the article's comments to see for yourself.

Community Comments:

• Cal Evans
• Luke Welling
• Harun Yayli