On the Developer Tutorials blog, Akash Mehta offers some suggestions of resources and methods for learning how to use regular expressions in your PHP applications.

When it comes to quickly dealing with large blocks of data, batch processing operations or screen scraping, regular expressions are often the most effective solution. There's just one problem, though - learning them can be as hard as learning a new language altogether. Here's how to get off to a flying start.

He points you first in the direction of the preg_* functions then towards a few examples (like with mod_rewrite) and tools to help you understand how things match, like the regex tested extension for firefox and the regular expression cheat sheet on ILoveJackDaniels.com.

Jim Plush has posted an offifical release announcement about his latest contribution to the PHP community - a debugging tool combining PHP (through the myBIC framework) and the Firefox FireBug extension.

I put together a couple pieces of technology to give the PHP community a debugger/profiler that should make life easier in the "web2.0" world. Are you tired of echo'ing print statements in your ajax calls? Writing to log files? Firing up big ol debuggers just to see what the value of some array is? Well look no further than the new MyBic PHP Debugger.

The tool is a smaller part of his larger MyBIC framework and can do things like writing log files, echo information back out to the screen, and communicate information back out to the Firefox user. There is a standalone version of FireBug that will be posted for those that don't want to have to install an entire framework to use it.

Keep an eye out (here and on his blog) for the links to the release when it's posted. In the meantime, you can check out a screencast [mov] of the package in action or just the screenshots in the blog entry.