Carsten Lucke has posted about the release of the third edition of O'Reilly's "PHP5 Cookbook" ("PHP5 Kochbuch") German edition:

The book is published by O'Reilly - written by David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg, Stephan Schmidt, Ulrich Speidel, Carsten Lucke and Matthias Brusdeylins. The German PHP 5 cookbook in a new and completely revised 3rd edition with information on the new PHP 5.3. Collected knowledge of American and German PHP experts. It contains hundreds of well-approved "recipes" including explanations of the new PHP features.

Carsten and Matthias Brusdeylins reworked the third edition and revised quite a bit of it for this new release (including adding some PHP 5.3 examples). The book comes in at a hefty 879 pages and more information can be found on the O'Reilly website.

The PHP Women are trying to put together a different sort of "cookbook" than most of the community might be used to. It combines two meanings of the word and gives both PHP "recipes" and actual ones once the book is flipped.

Hi, there has been the idea/concept of a PHPWomen Cookbook being produced. Being Silly thing that I am, I [BinaryKitten] volunteered to collate and produce it. You read the book 1 way and it will all be PHP Recipes. Flip the book over and it will all be culinary recipes.

They're still in the panning stages, so they need feedback from the community as to whether the idea can get off the ground, who might want to contribute to the recipes and what it would take to get it into print and distributed. Have some ideas? let them know! (and no, you don't have to be female to participate)

Those wanting to get into Facebook development might want to check out this new site Hasin Hayder has been working on - a Facebook Cookbook (not affiliated with the O'Reilly book by the same name). He talks about it here.

So i am planning to star writing an open book (right now it is a blog, when we will have thousands or recipes we will make it a book) which will follow cookbook approach for Facebook application developers. I will highlight common problems (there are numbers of problems with no solutions in their wikis) and their solutions which I've learned in my last one and half year journey as an application developer on Facebook platform.

Several topics have already been covered including:

• facebook reveals status api - how to use it?
• how to resize facebook popup dialog box
• how to add profile tab for your facebook application
• how to successfully update all of your user's profile offline, at once!
• publishing on your friend's mini feed (no session key)

Symfony developers that do work offline will be happy to know that the framework's documentation is now available as a PDF:

As of today, most of the symfony documentation is available as PDF files. The PDF files are available for all major symfony versions.

They also link to the Jobeet tutorial (Propel/Doctrine), their Forms book and Cookbook.

code:diesl has posted their list of the top six books that can help you master the PHP language:

If you are new to PHP or are thinking of moving to PHP form other language then the following list of books will provide you with the required knowledge to become a seasoned PHP programmer. Of course, the list is subjective and you may have a different list of books in mind.

Their list is made up of:

• Zend PHP5 Certification
• PHP in Action
• PHP and MySQL Web Development
• PEAR
• PHP Cookbook
• SQL for MySQL Developers

Chris Hartjes has posted about a new resource that he "cannot stop recommending people to use [it] when searching for answers to their CakePHP problems" - the CakePHP Cookbook.

With a ton of help from Andy Dawson (AD7Six) the documentation for CakePHP 1.2 has moved forward immensely with the unveiling of the CakePHP Cookbook. It's a combination of manual and wiki, where people can flesh out the manual and make comments on the methods in there.

With the wiki in place, anyone can add to the communal CakePHP wisdom (or correct where others might have strayed) to make it a bigger and better resource for the whole range of CakePHP developers.

On KillerSites.com, Stefan Mischook has a new book review of a new version of a good old PHP book standby - the 2nd Edition of the PHP Cookbook from O'Reilly.

The 'cookbook' series from O'Reilly press target a reader who understands (at least) the basics of a subject, these are not good books for beginners. This is the 2nd edition and covers PHP 5.

Stefan comments on the content of the book, noting that it covers "chunks" of functionality by task rather than teaching the language details behind it. He notes that this is just the book for someone needing to perform some kind of task, and just looking for the bit of code to get it done. The book also shares some helpful hints along the way, like "What is the difference between ereg and preg?"

Overall, he recommends the book, but only for those that already have a gasp on PHP and need those little code bits to make things work.

David Skalr shares some good news on the publishing front - the latest version (second edition) of the "PHP Cookbook" is rolling off the presses.

The new edition of PHP Cookbook is on the way! I got one copy yesterday, so it should be making its way into bookstores and online-bookstore-warehouses any day now.

Updates included in this edition are:

• revamped XML and OOP sections
• new PDO information
• information on testing code
• performance tuning
• regular expressions

Check out the O'Reilly page of the book for complete information.

David Sklar has two quick new posts today about two new PHP books that he's recieved - a copy of the French version of the O'Reilly "Learning PHP 5" book, and the "PHP Cookbook" in Russian.

The Russian translation of PHP Cookbook, arrived in the mail yesterday. My rudimentary sound-out-Cyrillic-letters skills that remain from a trip to the Soviet Union in 1989 have been helpful as I stumble my way through.

The delivery man also brought PHP 5 - Elementi di programmazione, the Italian translation of Learning PHP 5. It looks great, although I have to admit I'm a tiny bit disappointed that they didn't take the French approach and transpose all the Chinese food references into local delicacies.

If you're interested in either of these translations, be sure to check them out. They're O'Reilly, so you know the quality's good - even better that you can read it in your native language!