I've been in PHP development for more than 10 years and this book is really useful material. I could recommend it to beginners and experienced developers. From my point of view, there are three types of developer books - complete byte-to-byte fat books, introduction books and cookbooks. I want my cookbook to have useful and simple to use recipes. This book fulfilled my expectations.

He mentions some of the topics that the book covers including javascript libraries and frameworks (mostly jQuery) and recipes for things like form validation, dynamic content, pagination and drag and drop functionality. He also points out some coverage of testing and debugging content as well as web service "mashups" and mobile app development.

The review includes an overall assessment of the book, a detailed description of how the chapters are laid out and some of the complaints he had about the book's contents - a lack of code examples in some places, demos/screenshots pointing out what the framework can really do and the inclusion of some deprecated methods.

Overall, the book is well organized, focused and will be helpful on it's purpose. I felt it's capable to teach Kohana to a new guy, in a smooth way. Yes, there have some printing mistakes, old (because they are changed in new version) function use and some other minor issues, but seems ignorable to me. I'd recommend it for Kohana beginners.

In this review I focus on the changes between the editions of the book, which are brief and objective, since the core of the work remains the same and with the same quality. [...] In sum, I recommend reading this book to those looking forward to improve their skills in PHP, or intend to create new frameworks. To put it simply, a good book to read, and with new tricks to learn.

He (the reviewer, Alexandre Altair de Melo) briefly looks at these differences between the versions, with the largest being in Chapter 15 - the building of a sample application to apply all of the theory learned in the rest of the book. You can find more information about the book on Packt's website here.

personally find the "cookbook" style of books to be the most helpful. They enable me to quickly find answers to the problem "show me how to do something realistic using your tool". Hello World doesn't cut it for the tools I need to use. [...] Like any well-thought-out book, they cover the main components of CakePHP. One of the thing I liked was that you didn't have to necessarily read the book from front-to-back in order to get something from it.

He mentions other positive things about the book - like the chapter on using the command-line tools that come with CakePHP - and one of the negatives (not so much about the book as it is the CakePHP project's choices).

After receiving the book I started reading it. But right from the start the author displayed bad practices and mis-use of PHP. Reading the book from front to back, the author Kae Verens (@kae_verens) has confronted me with bad use of variables (like $a, $b, $c), bad use of PHP structures and a complete wrong approach of using JavaScript, where JavaScript should enrich an application instead of incorporating business logic.

In his "good" category fell things like the interesting variety of jQuery plugins mentioned and how the CMS example was broken up into easily digestible chunks. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the book falls into his "bad" and "ugly" category" including the structure of the application, the quality of the code and the lack of filtering/validation that was done on input.

I'm glad I decided to take a look at this book. It's pretty dense at 450+ pages, but it really does work you through from start to finish how to build a small social networking site in PHP. Okay, it's about dinosaurs, but let's not quibble. I'm not into long-depth book reviews, so we can talk about what I liked about this book.

He likes the consistency of the book's approach to the subject and points out that it promotes refactoring and improving code over striking out and using something new and trendy. He also mentions their emphasis on security. The one thing he didn't like about the book was a simple one - there were no unit tests to back up any of the code in the book.

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.

The nomination stage is now closed and voting has begun in the 2010 Open Source Awards. [...] You can cast your vote here: http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home/voting-stage.

The categories for the awards this year are:

• Open Source CMS Award
• Hall of Fame CMS
• Most Promising Open Source Project
• Open Source E-Commerce Applications
• Open Source JavaScript Libraries
• Open Source Graphics Software

If you want more information or to cast your vote for any of the projects in these categories, go over to the Packt voting page and get your opinion heard.

When I read a book about a programming framework, I'm expecting to see that they start off with the basics of using the framework, then keep expanding on the abilities of the framework. By the end of the book, you should be able to build something OTHER than the example application (if they provide one). [...] This book starts with the basics of the framework, and patiently builds on the concepts you previously learned. Good, clear examples of how to do things.

He mentions two of the interesting things the book touches on that some introductory books tend to leave out - coverage of extending the framework itself and how to worry about scalability. Overall he recommends the book to anyone looking to do CodeIgniter development.

[It] is a tour through a variety of processes and systems that the author suggests should be in use by any serious PHP developer. [...] The book is aimed squarely at developers, though most of the advice only really applies if implemented by an entire team, so the natural audience is team leads or one man bands, where decisions regarding coding standards or framework usage are under their control.

He talks about the quality of the writing and how well the topics are covered and how each chapter seems to read like an in-depth tutorial on the given topic (things like phpDocumentor, Eclipse, Subversion, frameworks and UML). He does mention one or two things he would have liked to see out of the book that weren't there like more of a description on problems/issues that popped up using the tools.