First off this morning, someone from over on Zorka.com wrote in to tell me about a PHP tutorial that they have posted. Greetings! I teach PHP classes at a local college in the Ann Arbor, MI area. A few months ago I put the course material I use to teach the class online on my web site here. I think it is a fairly complete tutorial complete with download of previous written examples. Hopefully it will provide another resource for those looking to learn PHP. I have to say that this is one of the more complete PHP resources that I've seen in a long time. They have a little bit of everything here - and it's perfect for beginners. They even get into sessions and classes/objects! If you're just starting out, I highly recommend this site to you...

For those of you out there looking to get PHP to communicate with that special little app that uses a custom network interface, you're in luck. DevShed has a new article about PHP socket programming. You can do some wonderful things with PHP and the raw socket stuff, but they still do recommend C++ (or Java) for more advanced socket programming, bt PHP can hold its own for most things. They give the simple example of just connecting to a server and running a remote command and returning the output. Check it out!

DynamicWebPages.de has a two new things about the PHPAccelerator product created as an alternative to the similar Zend product. They have released a new version, Version 1.2p1 for Linux and Solaris. New features include a redesigned shared memory cache for more throughput on heavily loaded sites and provides more configuration options. A cache admin tool is also included for displaying information about the files in the cache. They have a GUI frontend for their software that was just released too. Check out the PHP Accelerator Cache Admin tool, and, if you'd like, you can try it out.