On DZone.com today John Esposito has posted about three guides that want to help you improve your PHP development skills (including a forum post and two articles).

Sometimes, then, improving your generic 'programming brain' will help you improve your facility with a particular language. At other times, it's more important to learn the nuances of a language, paying close attention to the kind of applications the language is used for. [...] For improving your PHP, then, you can do two things: become a better programmer; and understand PHP more finely, more deeply.

The three guides share a lot of the same concepts in common - naming conventions, separation of functionality, DRY (don't repeat yourself), testing code, etc.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new tutorial written by Nathan Good about improving the quality of your Flash applications (built in Flash Builder 4) with the help of unit testing with PHPUnit.

Unit testing is becoming a fairly common element of software projects because of its promise of providing better quality to the code base. [...] This article is about improving your code quality in a sample project using Adobe Flash Builder 4 to build a rich user interface (UI) and connecting to PHP services via Zend Action Message Format (AMF). In this article, you learn how to write tests using two frameworks: FlexUnit and PHPUnit.

He starts with an overview of unit testing - why you should test your applications even though it might seem counterproductive and a description of what parts of your application the two testing tools (FlexUnit and PHPUnit) can help with. He first focuses is on the latter of the two and he shows how to get PHPUnit installed and write a first test on an example class. Following that, he moves over to the FlexUnit side and gives the same class and first test example. He then talks about running and automating the testing on both sides and even touches on things like continuous integration and code coverage results.

On the DevBots blog recently Darby Felton posted a few suggestions of things that could be done to help improve IT organizations from the inside and promote a more healthy environment for everyone involved.

Lately I have been thinking about a few aspects of the information technology industry. Particularly, regarding software development, I am concerned that the following characteristics remain pervasive and detrimental to our industry: far too many software development projects ultimately fail, we tend to lack clear, rigorous standards and credentials that other industries typically employ, and our [lack of] adherence to ethics and professional conduct leaves much to be desired.

He addresses each of these, pointing out that a good number of IT environments have fallen into these issues and steps need to be taken to: reduce the failure rate of projects, hone down the staff to those that will turn out the best possible product and will uphold a good set of standards/ethics while they do.

While not specifically related to caching in PHP applications, this recent post from developer.com has some good reminders of how much the right kind of caching can help your application to really fly.

If you're looking at performance and you want to get some quick wins, the obvious place to start is caching. Caching as a concept is focused exclusively around improving performance. [...] Fundamentally caching has one limitation - managing updates - and several decisions. In this article, we'll explore the basic options for caching and their impact on performance.

They talk about three different update methods - a synchronized update, lazy update and a read-through strategy (where the caching functionality itself can force a re-read of the original source). There's also a brief look at options to consider when caching data and how you're going to manage that cache once you've filled it with data.

Stefan Mischook has posted another video to his KillerPHP.com site today looking at how you can become a better programmer - by learning another language.

In this video, I discuss how learning another programming language will make you a better PHP programmer. This may seem strange at first, but watch the video and you will see that I am not smoking anything...

He recommends learning something like Java or Actionscript or something that's not a match (ex. another web language) for what you're doing now. Something that's complementary would be even better. Thankfully, most languages share traits of others - common thought processes behind implementation and the like - so its simpler than you might think.

Stefan Koopmanschap has posted a few reasons why he thinks you should attend and participate in your local TestFest event.

As I wrote earlier, several TestFest events will be held soon with the biggest one being the European TestFest initiative of quite a big bunch of European usergroups. But why should you attend such a TestFest?

Here's his four reasons:

• To improve PHP
• Improve your own knowledge
• To expand your network
• Because you're friggin cool!

You can find out more about TestFests in your area at this page on PHP's QA website.

On the PHP in Action blog today Dagfinn has pointed out a presentation that, while directed at Java developers, has some good suggestions for anyone working in software development - 10 Ways to Improve Your Code (from Neal Ford).

I discovered a video presentation available from QCon SF 2008 by Neal Ford called 10 Ways to Improve Your Code. Although the examples are in Java, most of the presentation is relevant to PHP. There are some ideas here that I've never heard of myself, such as "anti-objects". Some of the main headings are a bit cryptic, so you may have to see the video itself to have them explained.

The list of ten ways includes things like test-driven development, good citizenship, the "single level of abstraction principle and anti-objects.

Justin has a few suggestions - six of them - to help you improve the security of your WordPress blog.

Here's the list:

• WP Security Scan
• Change all accounts that have known usernames (example: admin).
• Remove Wordpress Version
• adminSSL
• askApache Password protect
• Wordpress firewall

For each of the items that are plugins, links are provided for direct download and installation instructions.

New on his blog Jani Hartikainen has posted a simple idea that you can take to make sure you're getting the most out of your Ajax/Zend Framework connections.

A common reason to use Ajax in a website is to make it feel faster, so you usually want Ajax requests be processed as quickly as possible. While there are many ways to speed up Zend Framework based applications, there are still some things like routing and dispatching which still add up to the total. There is, however, another way to make Ajax work even faster

Since Ajax requests don't usually require all of the complex routing and dispatching that a normal Zend Framework request might, he recommends creating a separate Ajax handler. His includes an example of a simple searching endpoint with a class handling the backend logic. A simple handler script loads up the bootstrap and makes the request for the search, returning the search results in a JSON format.

On the Smashing Magazine site Glen Stasberry has posted a few tips to help improve your PHP development practices.

Because of PHP's huge popularity, it has become almost impossible for Web developers not to have at least a working knowledge of PHP. This tutorial is aimed at people who are just past the beginning stages of learning PHP and are ready to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with the language. Listed below are 10 excellent techniques that PHP developers should learn and use every time they program. These tips will speed up proficiency and make the code much more responsive, cleaner and more optimized for performance.

Suggestions include using a SQL injection cheat sheet, "shortcutting" the else in your conditionals, don't use regular expressions if you don't have to, using ternary operators and using memcached. You can see the full list here.