Whether you're relatively new to the PHP 5.3 scene or just want to be sure you don't miss out on some of the cool new features it has to offer, check out this new guide from Matthew Weier O'Phinney covering the new features of this great release.

Most of the time, these features are straight-forward, and you can simply use them; in other cases, however, we've run into behaviors that were unexpected. This post will detail several of these, so you either don't run into the same issues -- or can capitalize on some of our discoveries.

He talks about some of the strange things he's come across like the fact that PHP doesn't like serializing closures, problems with using the new "__invoke" helper and some picky things that you need to know about namespacing your code.