On her blog Lorna Mitchell has posted an example of a basic generator written in PHP, a feature of the upcoming PHP version 5.5.

I really like the generators feature that's arriving in PHP 5.5, and since we're now into release candidate releases, it's actually not that far away. I've been speaking on this topic and I thought I'd share my trivially simple code example from my slides.

She includes an example of a very basic generator using the new "yield" keyword and how to implement it in a simple foreach loop. There's also a little talk about when is a good time to use generators in your applications (two examples: complex number calculation and working with large data sets a chunk at a time). For more information on how these generators will work, check out this page in the PHP manual.

7PHP.com has another community interview posted today - this time it's with Jakub Vrana, a co-author that works on the official PHP manual.

In this edition I talked with Jakub Vrana who is a co-author of The Official PHP Manual. Adminer and NotORM. I invite you to know him better and to learn from his 7php PHP interview.

The interview shares Jakub's answers about things like:

• His history as a PHP developer
• What he sees as good and bad parts of it
• His preferred tools
• His choices on frameworks and ORMs
• How to get started contributing to the documentation/manual
• Some about his book "1001 tips and tricks for PHP"

In his latest post Matt Frost takes a look at dependency injection. He thinks out loud about some of the common uses for it but wonders if there's a middle ground for using a DIC and injecting manual dependencies.

The question I have is what if a dependency in one class also has a dependency? To illustrate what I mean, here's an example with some code to follow. [...] I'm not really concerned about the code here as much as I am about the concept that I'm trying to illustrate, in order to use a dependency injection container for this scenario.

In his example code, he shows a "DBAuthMethod" class that extends the "AuthMethod" interface and an "Auth" class that requires an instance of "AuthMethod" as a constructor parameter. He wonders about constructor versus setter injection and thinks that a mix of the two may not be the best structure for the code.

I just can wrap my mind around a scenario where you could ONLY use a DIC, and if you can't use the concept exclusively what benefit is there to using it?

Have any suggestions to share? Let him know - this is a problem more and more developers run into as DIC becomes more widely used.

As Chris Jones has posted on his Oracle blog, there's been a recent update to the Underground PHP and Oracle Manual with a complete refresh of content from more recent versions of the powerful database.

The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual is designed to bridge the gap between the many PHP scripting language and the many Oracle Database books available. It contains unique material about PHP's OCI8 extension for Oracle Database, and about other components in the PHP-Oracle ecosystem. It shows PHP developers how to use PHP and Oracle together, efficiently and easily.

Updates include new content related to the Oracle XE 11g release and the latest updates to their OCI8 extension for PHP. Other updates include information about using PHP with Oracle TimesTen, NetBeans and Oracle Tuxedo as well as getting PHP installed on the Oracle Solaris operating system.

A new blog has started up that mentions some of the "masterpieces" that occur in the PHP manual - phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com:

Sparkling gems found in the official PHP documentation, mostly in the user-submitted comments. Not meant to pick on anyone, just to serve as a source of wonderment.

There's already several posts to the blog including:

• Here's my int, so cast it maybe
• Two quotes that make me sad
• Two's Complewhat
• The documentation clearly says raptors

You can subscribe to their RSS feed if you'd like to keep up.

The CodeDevelopr.com site has posted a handy reference list of 50+ guides and manuals that can make looking up those key facts easier.

This is a list of over 50+ Documentation Manuals and Guides for Programmers, Web Developers, and Web Designers. I will actively update this list with more Manuals as I come across them. If you would like something added, please leave it in the comments section below. Over time it will become more refined and better organized and in return, more useful so please bookmark and share with your friends.

Linked resources include:

• the PHP manual
• the HTML5 reference
• Zend Framework docs
• Redis docs
• Dochub.io (online code searching)

Marcus Bointon has written up the process he took to get the PHP extension for Wkhtmltopdf (a conversion tool for HTML to PDF generation) up and working on a Mac OSX machine - not as easy a task as it sounds.

Wkhtmltopdf is extremely cool. I've used qtwebkit for generating server-side page images before using python-webkit2png, and that's fine (unlike using Firefox running in xvfb!), but I need to produce PDFs. So, I looked around and found several neat, simple PHP wrappers for calling wkhtmltopdf, and even a PHP extension. "Great", I thought, "I'll just install that and spend time working on the layouts since the code looks really simple". I spoke too soon.

He goes through each step of the process - installing the needed wkhtmltox and libwkhtmltox support, having to manually compile wkhtmltopdf and some of the small changes you'll need to make to the Makefile to get things to cooperate. He shows where to put the resulting application files and the name of the extension to enable in your php.ini.

New in the PHP manual: a mysqli quickstart. You are new to PHP but you know how to code, you know SQL, you know relational databases and MySQL? Then, I hope, this is for you. All you need is a quick overview on the concepts? The rest is in the reference section! Here you go.

It includes sections on:

• making connections
• executing statements
• stored procedures
• multiple statements

In a new post today Martin Sikora has points out a Google Chrome extension he's created that lets you view some of the basics of the PHP manual without leaving the browser.

Finally, I released my extension for Google Chrome called PHP Ninja Manual (Ninja - because I like Avinash Kaushik'sblog and he always call people who are very skilled in something as "Ninjas"). I was always lazy to open PHP documentation every time I had to look at some method definition and its parameters so I made this extension which is actually preparsed official PHP manual available instantly in a popup window.

You can see a screenshot of it in action here including the auto-complete searching and the example of the function's summary details. If you try it out and have feedback, go over to the forum for it and leave your comments.

The PHP documentation team has made a new announcement about some major changes that are happening with the PHP documentation - three interesting new additions to this part of the PHP project.

PHP has several [three] new documentation features that the community should be aware of.

They've introduced the following:

• PHP manual pages (man pages) - pman - installed via PEAR
• An enhanced CHM (Windows help) version of the manual with user notes
• The Online Documentation Editor allowing edits from anyone.