I'm delighted to be able to announce that Ryan Mauger and myself have agreed with Manning to write a new book on Zend Framework 2.0. to be called Zend Framework 2 in Action! It's very early days, so we have planned the Table of Contents, but have very little manuscript. The current plan is to cover the major components of Zend Framework 2 in the context of a long running application that we will start in chapter 2 and then build upon as we go through each chapter.

The book will cover topics like creating Zend Framework applications, bootstrapping, modules, Doctrine 2 integration, caching, making and consuming web services and migrating your application up from the world of Zend Framework version 1.x.

It is very rare to encounter a book like this, which teaches object-oriented programming from a non naive point of view (How do I write those "classes?") in the PHP environment. PHP is still catching up with other languages in this field and many developers can only benefit from improving their modeling skills and design practices.

He talks about the topics the book focuses on including a bit of information on design pattern and test-driven development as well as some of the basics of really getting to know the PHP language. This isn't a beginner book, though - as Giorgio notes:

The average developer which has a deep understanding of the PHP technology will find this book useful to start upgrading his skills to the next level. [...] The level of the book is adequate for the intermediate coder, thus I found it easy to read. Nevertheless, it is a good panoramic of the PHP landscape in term of the transition to object-oriented programming.

That's how this new post on the PHP in Action blog starts this morning. The one thing that he wants is enumeration support in PHP. He shows how it can currently come close with a "roles" system:

Useful examples I've encountered in web programming are states or stages in a process and user roles. Another kind of example is one I used in PHP In Action: an authorization system with three fixed roles or categories of user: regular, webmaster and administrator.

He sets up an example class that sets constants for the different access levels rather than just relying on strings to handle it (which, as he points out, could very easily be misspelled and not throw any kind of error) .

Today we are going to do something a little different. I've got books stacking up here that need reviewing, so I'm going to start interjecting book reviews into the podcast stream. [...] This week's book is "PHP in Action" by Manning Publications.

You can grab the mp3 of the podcast directly from the site or you can add the podcast's feed to your aggregator of choice and get this and other great episodes.

Again a somewhat belated announcement: PHP in Action is in print. [...] Strenuously objective as always, I have to say that it's a pretty good book. I've had to read it about fifteen times already, and I still sort of enjoyed it the last time.

You can get more information on the book from its page on the Manning Publishing website as well as purchase a copy - $39.99 USD for the print version (plus PDF ebook) or just $20.00 USD for the PDF ebook by itself.

Manning Publications has released the book PHP In Action as ebook in PDF format. I wrote it with help from my co-authors Marcus Baker and Chris Shiflett. The print version is due out June 30.

You can order both the ebook only or a combo of the ebook plus the print version directly from Manning.

Over the last few days I got the chance to skim through the upcoming Manning release "PHP in Action: Modern Software Practices for PHP" by Dagfinn Reiersøl et al. The reviewed book is seperated into four main parts, covering lots of interesting topics in a good and fluent writing style.

Raphael outlines the book, mentioning the four parts the book is divided up into:

• Basic PHP tools and concepts
• Developing applications via Test Driven Development
• Web presentation and user interfaces
• Object-oriented development including things like database abstraction

You know you've been waiting for it, here it is. The final installment of Chapter 7 of PHP in Action by Dagfinn Reiersol. Without further comment, here's the introduction to this section in Dagfinn's own words: "In this section we discuss an Iterator and a Composite."

Dagfinn briefly mentions what the two patterns are about - a "canned loop" and making tree structures easy. Check out the PDF for the remainder of the chapter.

If you've been anxiously awaiting part two of this series then your wait is over. Here's a short introduction to the section part of this series written by the author of the book, Dagfinn Reiersol. I had the privilege of meeting Dagfinn at phpuk last week. Below the introduction is the link I know you've been waiting for.

The new PDF they link to focus on two different patterns - the Decorator (a wrapper class) pattern and the Null Object (an object that works like the others but does nothing behind the scenes) pattern.

Included in the happenings he mentions were the talk that Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone gave on mashups, Kevin Henney's look at Object Orientation, and Rasmus Lerdorf's look at PHP5 performance/security. He also mentions meeting up with Dagfinn Reiersol (author of PHP in Action) to "talk shop" a bit about writing books.

You can check out all of the details about the conference that was over on their website including summaries of the talks that were given during this jam-packed one day event.