The IBM developerWorks site has a new tutorial posted (registration/login required) talking about image creating in PHP using the GD library.

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to get started with the GD library and to provide a variety of techniques you can apply to your Web-page coding. The tutorial doesn't cover every GD function, but it teaches you the basics. The Resources section provides Web sites where you can learn more about using the GD library.

They go through the creation of sample images, working with gradients and lines, adding text, saving the image data out to a file and how to work with existing graphics to modify them.

In another part of their series of excerpts from the Zend PHP Certification Guide (from Zend), DevShed has posted this article talking about debugging and performance issues and methods.

Making mistakes is human, and so is fixing them. In your day-to-day programming adventures, it's inevitable to introduce bugs in your PHP code, especially when you're writing very complex applications with tens of thousands of lines of code spread across tens of files.

In this article they look at things like flattening if statements, spplitting single commands across multiple lines, and the difference between =, ==, and ===.

On Tobin Bradley's blog today, there's a follow up to a previous artcile posted concerning getting MapServer working on a Windows/IIS install. This time, they show how, with a few lines of PHP code, you can create a map quickly and easily.

PHP/Mapscript makes this fantastically easy, with only 19 lines of code! You can download the code here.

The remainder of the post steps you through the process of installing the script and, with a few simple calls, you have a functional map of your chosen location.