Just to start off with a small note, over on Zend this morning, they have a new book review for the latest Wrox PHP book - PHP4 Multimedia Programming. This book is not for beginners (by far) and dives into such topics as making PDF files, using Ming to make SWF movies, and making images with ImageMagick. It looks like a nice book with plenty of resouces already built in (the last part is a reference for all the functions that you'd need for each previous section), and there's tons of material covered in here. Looks like Wrox has managaed to produce yet another fell-formed reference for the PHP massses.

If you can remember a few months back (2) over on Evolt.org had the first part of an article about the storage and reuse of images with PHP & GD. Well, they have officialy put out the second part of that series with this article. Where as the first one just got into building the backend to support the image system and some of the scripts to upload and publish the images - the second part covers the image search and making a popup window that shows the full image. The search is set up to allow you to look for strings in the alt text, title, description, height, width, etc.... Overall it looks like a pretty nice image storage and search system - nothing fancy, but reliable is more often better than super-fancy.

And finally, for all those out there still struggling with how a join in SQL can make your life better - here's an article for you. In this article, they get down to the basics (with examples from Microsoft SQL server, but any standard SQL database should work with these) and show you what a join is good for and what the different types of joins do, such as the inner join, outer join, cross join, and a regular old join. A nice join has saved my life more than once in the past, keeping me from having to do three or four different queries and making my SQL statements so much quicker.