On the PHPWomen blog today there's a new book review of SitePoint's latest major PHP publication - "PHP Master" (by Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik and Matthew Turland).

At 357 pages (375 including index), this book provides a thorough grounding in the key topics todays PHP developer should strive to know, and know well. The back cover ambitiously states that the book is "guaranteed to take your PHP skills to the next level". Keep reading to find out whether or not I agree.

She walks you through the contents of the book, noting that, despite her being an experienced developer, there were still things that she found new.

Despite the stated demographic, I think this book has a lot to offer novice developers. It would be a real challenge to properly digest and understand the wide range of topics covered, but an achievable and worthwhile one nonetheless. [...] If you're still undecided, my advice is buy the book - you won't regret it.

Rafael Dohms has posted a review of a book from Ivo Jansch and Vito Chin - "PHP Development in the Cloud", a guide to some considerations about running PHP applications on cloud-based platforms.

Cloud computing is finally reaching a point of maturity and leaving its early "hype" years behind. Ivo and Vito do a very good job of bringing the topic into a PHP developer's world in a very concise and objective manner, without leaving important platforms and concepts behind.

He briefly mentions the book's contents, both the technical and infrastructure issues it addresses, and gives a general opinion on the book and recommends it:

The book was a very pleasant read, not thick and not too thin. It helped me greatly as I prepared to give a presentation on Cloud Computing, allowing me to see different points of view as well as compare other technologies i had not had time or chance to try.

New from Query7.com today there's a book review of a release from Packt Publishing titled "PHP5 CMS Framework Development" covering the creation of a custom CMS system from the ground up.

PHP5 CMS Framework Development is a 322 page book that covers all aspects of creating a full featured content management system (CMS) in PHP5. The author Martin Brampton has a history of developing extensions for the Mambo and Joomla CMS projects. He became lead developer of the CMS Mambo before starting his own CMS, Aliro. The book is split up into 14 chapters. The first is an introduction to CMS and PHP5 concepts and the remaining 13 each look at a key feature of the CMS.

The review covers the contents of the book in a bit more depth, talking about a few chapters specifically and how they felt it was overall a "great learning experience". He mentions a few negatives about the book, however - the code examples are all pulled from an existing CMS (Aliro), the conventions used in them and the heavy use of singletons. He still recommends it if you're looking to write your own CMS, though. It still provides some good insight into the methods and pieces that make them up.

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new book review from Cal Evans covering a recent release from McGraw/Hill (by Vikram Vaswani, frequently posted on the ZDZ) called Zend Framework, A Beginner's Guide.

Vikram has been a long-time contributor to DevZone and is the author of our most popular article series, Zend Framework, A Beginner's Guide. [...] The language is easy to read, the examples are clear and there's even a joke or two in there that will make you groan. In short, I would recommend this book to any PHP developer with a firm grasp on object oriented programming in PHP. If you are not comfortable with OOP, this is not the book for you.

He gets "the bad" of the book out of the way first mentioning the book's tendency to jump from subject to subject and how he suggests models should be in Zend Framework applications (going with Doctrine over custom models). On the good side of things, he mentions the easy to follow writing style, the very complete code examples and the "complete" feel the book has.

New from the php|architect blog today there's a post talking about a new book from Feisty Duck Publishing about ModSecurity for Apache and how that effects the world of PHP.

ModSecurity is a web application firewall. It can live in and out of the Apache web server environment, one of the most popular web servers around. ModSecurity is infinitely customizable and extremely powerful. The philosophy of ModSecurity can be summed up in a few words. Look, and only modify if I tell you to.

The author of the post (Orlanao Medina) thinks that this book is *the* resource for ModSecurity-related information, providing step-by-step information on how to work with the tool both inside and outside of Apache. It shares tips on blocking XSS attacks, brute force attacks and generally protecting your application in general.

Michelangelo van Dam has posted a review of the updated version of the Packt Publishing book "Mastering phpMyAdmin", time time covering the 3.1 version.

A couple of weeks ago I received a book from PACKT Publishing titled "Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management" written by Marc Delisle, with the request if I could read it and write a review about it. Why not ? I haven't used phpMyAdmin in whole my career so I might as well read about the tool everyone around me is using. And since phpMyAdmin is also bundled with Zend Server, it can only benefit my day-to-day job.

He talks about the contents of the book (chapters on the phpMyAdmin interface, working with MySQL on the command line) and some of the handy bits of information he learned along the way.

PHPClasses.org has released a new book review of an APress offering - "Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP" (as reviewed by Marcelo Santos Araujo).

"Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP" delivers to the readers a guided tour, which covers topics such as JavaScript libraries, Google Maps integration, Zend Framework and application design principles. In other words, it gives the reader the ability to understand and build from scratch, a full featured Web 2.0 blog application.

The review goes through each of the chapters and describes their contents and summarizes the quality of the book at the end by noting that it's really for a wide range of skill levels, not just the budding programmer.

PHPClasses.org has released a book review of the php|architect "Guide to Enterprise PHP Development" (Ivo Jansch) reviewed by Mauricio Garcia Nascimento.

Do not expect an advanced on PHP programming. As the author says, "this book is about PHP, but it is not about code" and "writing PHP code is only a part of the entire development life-cycle". It is definitely not about coding, neither about technical programming tricks. The book describes best practices, lessons learned, practical experiences, tools, techniques, methodologies and other related knowledge areas that all PHP professionals should follow to develop better enterprise software products.

Mauricio goes on to look at where the book fits in the development process and some of the specific chapters and what they offer to the Software Development Life Cycle process.

Despite it is difficult to focus the scope and the target public of the book writing about an area that encompasses too many topics of interest, Ivo Jansch, the author, did a great job to achieve this result with success.

On the PHPClasses.org website there's a new book review posted from Alexandre Altair de Melo about a new book from Packt Publishing - "PHP 5 CMS Framework Development" (by Martin Brampton).

Often developers have to think about several aspects of the architecture of a system for the Web, not necessarily restricted to requirements of the software. With this in mind the book "PHP 5 CMS - Framework Development" is very rewarding reading.

Alexandre talks about the author of the book, the wide range of topics discussed in it (some not just applying to CMSes) and a breakdown of the contents of each chapter.

It is great work from the book author and the publisher, as we now have another great title, not only about PHP, but also about designing an architecture for software not just for only for creating content management systems.

PHPClasses.org has reviewed a new book today - "Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP" from Wrox Publishing by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie.

This is a topic about which there is a lot to say, starting from the Google page rank algorithm, and what to do, as well what you should not do, to have your sites optimized to attract as many visitors as possible using search engine sites.

That is precisely the main topic of the book "Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP". Despite the title mentions PHP, most of the knowledge presented in this book applies to all kinds of sites, independently if they are served by PHP code or not.

Manuel notes that the "PHP part" mostly has to do with the creation of dynamic sites and working with current PHP applications (like WordPress) to make them more search engine friendly.

Overall, this is an excellent book search engine optimization - SEO. It is very complete. [...] Whether or not you are familiar with the subject, if you are looking for good a book to learn all you need to know about SEO, this may be an excellent choice.