In this article we take a look at the PHP tokenizer and its potential at analyzing and processing PHP source code. We will build several working examples, which you can start using and extending for your own purposes.

The author, Stan Vassilev, explains what the tokenizer is for, how it parses the code (via a lexer) and how to get at the tokens that are created. He uses the token_get_all and token_name functions to get the information and creates a wrapper class around them to strip whitespace and comments.

If you are already comfortable taking a project from concept to a working application this book will have little for you. If you are comfortable working with PHP, able to put together standalone tools and pages, perhaps develop a wordpress plugin but have not yet created a complete site from scratch then this may be the book that helps you "step up a gear".

He mentions the application that he book helps you develop (a blogging platform) and goes through a summary of each chapter with opinions on each. He also points to a sample chapter if you'd like an idea of what the book is like.

• Rodrigo Marcos - hacking PHP sockets for fun and profit
• David Kierznowski - exploitation techniques using real world examples
• Colin Watson - talk about security badges

There's links to the slides for one the formal presentations, the exploitation techniques - two sets: the remote exploit examples and local exploit examples.

Because learning and using most of these technologies can be rather challenging to a Web developer, perhaps the best way to get started doing so is by using all of them to create a single Web-based application, with no pretense at mastering any one of them. This is the approach taken in Quentin Zervaas's book, Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP."

The book (see its web page here) covers lots of different technologies and seeks to be pretty comprehensive and, at around 570 pages, crams as much between its covers as it can. He goes through some parts of the book specifically but glosses over some for the sake of the length of the review.

Want to assert yourself as a cutting-edge PHP web developer? Take a practical approach, learning by example from author Quentin Zervaas, and discover how to bring together the many technologies needed to create a successful, modern web application.

The book covers the full life-cycle of an application - setting up the framework, using CSS, adding dynamic effects - and includes information on using the PHP/MySQL combo, Ajax and APIs to enhance your application.

Check out the APress description for more details.

PHP, though, came along with a breakthrough idea - mod_php was an everything in one install. Unlike mod_perl, mod_php gave you a programming language, templating language and extension all in one.

He advocates the PHP language developer's decisions to include everything into the core of the language which (while maybe not the best of decisions) has made PHP into one of the most practical development languages and has helped to make it one of the most popular and widely used languages on the web.

Here are eight examples of practical PHP regular expressions and techniques that I've used over the past few years using Perl Compatible Regular Expressions. This guide goes over the eight different validation techniques and describes briefly how they work. Usernames, telephone numbers, email addresses, and more.

Each of the regular expressions comes complete with an explanation of what it is and the kinds of strings it's looking for. Comments on the post have helped even more, finding places where they might break or not catch all possibilities.

There are rather significant syntactical differences between PHP and Ruby. For example PHP requires semicolons at the end of lines and generally requires curly brackets to enclose blocks of code. Ruby, on the other hand, uses newline characters to denote the end of a line of code...

The post goes through other differences like: value return methods, function/method naming, similarities between them, frameworks, namespaces, documentation and hosting options.

I had borrowed a Perl Hacks book from and friend and really liked it, it was great! It had a lot of practical things as well as some fun things. I expected the same from PHP Hacks and I was not disappointed!

She links to both the table of contents and the sample chapter to give you an idea of the feel of the book. There's two main sections in the review covering both aspects of the book - the Practical Stuff and the Fun Stuff. Of course, no book is perfect, so there is one thing she mentions that wasn't really worked into the book, but you'll need to read the review to find out what.

In my previous article I summarized event system definitions and showed an example of PHP event model, which is built with the call_user_func() function. This acticle expands the subject by introducing an advanced PHP event model that is based on sender/eventObject/listener collaboration, which was popularized by the Java world.

He steps through some examples with ProtocolCommandSupport.java and ProtocolCommandListener.java functionality, showing how to take that functionality back over to PHP and implement it using the built-in features.