On the PHPWomen blog today there's a new book review of SitePoint's latest major PHP publication - "PHP Master" (by Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik and Matthew Turland).

At 357 pages (375 including index), this book provides a thorough grounding in the key topics todays PHP developer should strive to know, and know well. The back cover ambitiously states that the book is "guaranteed to take your PHP skills to the next level". Keep reading to find out whether or not I agree.

She walks you through the contents of the book, noting that, despite her being an experienced developer, there were still things that she found new.

Despite the stated demographic, I think this book has a lot to offer novice developers. It would be a real challenge to properly digest and understand the wide range of topics covered, but an achievable and worthwhile one nonetheless. [...] If you're still undecided, my advice is buy the book - you won't regret it.

As is mentioned in this new post to the SitePoint blogs, a new book has been released (by SitePoint press, naturally) about "writing cutting-edge PHP code" by a few well known authors in the PHP community - Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik and Matthew Turland.

Savvy PHP web developers can now keep ahead of the game and ensure that their PHP code is safe, secure, and well-structured for the future with the latest release from SitePoint: "PHP Master: Write Cutting-edge Code" by Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik, and Matthew Turland.

The book covers a wide range of topics (somewhat replacing SitePoint's usual "anthology" type of book) including:

• An introduction to OOP
• Working with databases
• Creating and working with APIs
• Design patterns
• Security
• Automated testing

As part of a special offer, you can pick up your print+ebook bundle for the price of just the book, about $40 USD. If you'd like a sample before purchasing, they've posted three sample chapters.

In this new post to his blog Robert Basic has a review of a book from php|architect (by Matthew Turland), "Guide to Web Scraping with PHP".

It took me a while to grab myself a copy of Matthew Turland's "Guide to Web Scraping with PHP", but a few weeks ago a copy finally arrived and I had the pleasure of reading it. [...] My overall impression of the book is that it was worth the time and I'm really glad that I bought it. Matthew did a great job explaining all the tools we have at our disposal for writing web scrapers and how to use them.

He talks about the content of a few specific chapters (the HTTP protocol, client libraries you can use and how to prepare documents for parsing) and notes that there's not much bad he can think of about the book:

It is a guide, clear and straight-to-the-point, explaining what tools are there, which one to use and how for writing scrapers and that's exactly what I wanted to know.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest episode - an interview with Matthew Turland. Cal asks his three questions:

• What was your first PHP project?
• What's the most difficult thing about running an open source project?
• What is the one mistake you see other open source projects make?

You can either listen to this latest episode via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a recent post about a book from Matthew Turland (recently available in print) - the php|architect's Guide to Web Scraping with PHP - and why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover.

I was really hesitant to commit to reviewing the book because I tend not to review books I don't like and this subject matter just wasn't doing it for me. So with great fear and trepidation, I popped open my review copy. (PDF so I could read it on my iPad) I was ever so surprised and in a very good way.

He talks about the different parts of the book - the foreword from Ben Ramsey ("expert in all things HTTP") and the two halves of the book. The first half deals with accessing the information on remote sites and the second talks about the actual scraping of the information (parsing out the content with things like regular expressions and SimpleXML).

If you've been waiting for the print edition of Matthew Turland's "Web Scraping with PHP" book (from php|architect Press) your wait is over. According to a new post on his blog the print version is now available for order.

I know a number of my readers have been waiting for this announcement: my book, Web Scraping with PHP, is now available for sale in hard copy form! That's right, you can now finally order your very own print edition copy. [...] To those who felt forced into buying the PDF edition to get access to the content because a print edition was not available until now, you have my most sincere and profound apologies.

His web scraping book covers topics like understanding HTTP requests on a base level, working with several HTTP clients like cURL, pecl_http, Zend_Http_Client and how to analyze the remote page's information with things like SimpleXML, the DOM functions and the XMLReader extension. If the print version's not your thing, you can still get the PDF from the php|architect store too.

php|architect has officially released one of their latest guides - this time it's Matthew Turland's "Guide to Web Scraping".

Matthew talks a bit about it in his latest blog entry:

What I'm announcing in this blog post has been in the works since early 2008 when I first pitched the idea. It was rejected by several major publishers who basically said the same thing: the idea was in too small of a niche or simply wasn't marketable. php|architect Press respectfully disagreed with them and decided to publish what is now a book written by me that you can purchase.

The book covers all things related to pulling content from remote pages including an understanding of HTTP codes, a look at tools you can use (including cURL, pecl_http and Zend_Http_Client) and how to use technologies like DOM, SimpleXML and regular expressions to match content.

php|architect has published the latest episode in their "oddWeek" podcast series today - episode 5 with an interview with Matthew Turland.

This week we talk with Blue Parabola Alumni Matthew Turland about the awesomeness that is Phergie [an IRC bot developed in PHP].

You can listen to this latest episode in a few different ways - you can either listen via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 directly or by subscribing to the php|architect feed to get this and other great news and articles from the site.

This year's php|tek conference is rapidly approaching and this year has a few more things in store for attendees than previous years. One of them is a Hackathon, organized by Matthew Turland (of Blue Parabola). I managed to grab a few minutes of Matt's time to has him a few questions about the Hackathon.

Q: Why a Hackathon?
The PHP community at large has seen a few recent events like Bughuntday and TestFest, but at the point where the idea came up to have a Hackathon, events like this had never part of a conference. This seems odd when you think about it, because conferences are a situation where a number of people interested in development are all in one physical location. While online collaboration is certainly possible it's not always as easy or fun as in-person real-time collaboration. And yet, events like these have occurred independently of conferences rather than in conjunction with them.

This will be the first year that an unconference event is included in the conference program for php|tek. I suppose my colleague who originated the Hackathon idea, Keith Casey, figured that firsts come better in pairs. Seriously, though, it gives this large number of aggregated developers a chance to make significant contributions to PHP projects that we all know and use.

Q: How has the interest level been?
The idea has had very positive reception. We've already gotten commitments from core developers of a number of major projects including PHP itself and a few well-known frameworks. It's commonplace at a conference for people to get into ad-hoc discussions with project developers and for patches to be written for issues or potential new features during those discussions. The Hackathon is an attempt to organize these occurrences so that many people are doing it at the same time and have an opportunity to coordinate and pool their efforts.

Q: Have any coding sprints been considered?
As a matter of fact, we've gotten a commitment from people involved in last year's TestFest event to organize another like it as part of the Hackathon. If you're unfamiliar with TestFest, it's a coordinated effort to improve the code coverage of PHP itself by writing tests in PHP. It's easy to get involved and people will be available at the Hackathon to bring you up to speed on what you need to know if you'd like to contribute. This is an excellent opportunity for developers to contribute to the stability and reliability of PHP, which has a widespread effect on all of us.

Q: Will the groups for each of the softwares be the ones to pick whats worked on or will people be free to hack away at any part?
While groups may guide those working, whether they do so will be their prerogative. Ultimately, it's your choice what you work on, and it doesn't have to be a project that someone else is representing. I myself plan to hack on Phergie, my PHP-based IRC bot. Bring your laptop, sit, hack, and have a good time with the rest of us. If everyone enjoys the event, I'll consider it a success and any contributions we make to PHP projects will be icing on the cake.

Q: So, what happens to the bugs they fix? Will they get pushed back into the project?
Ideally, yes. If not, they can be submitted as patches to project issue trackers, which makes them all the more likely to be accepted eventually. We're trying to get as many core project developers involved in the Hackathon as possible. At worst, they'll at least be aware of the patches that are submitted. At best, they can inspect them and push into project version control repositories soon after they're submitted at the Hackathon. So, if you know of a project whose core developers will be present at php|tek, you can help by encouraging them to attend the Hackathon!

Q: And the most important question - will food and beverage be provided?
The tentative plan is for the Hackathon to run from 4:30 to 10:30 on Thursday. Hors d'oeuvres will be served from 7:30 to 8:30, followed by drinks for the remaining time. While we'd certainly like for people to stay the entire time, there are a number of restaurants in the area where people can get dinner then come back for the rest of the event. In any case, we'll update the Hackathon page on the php|tek web site (http://tek.mtacon.com/c/s/hackathon) as more information becomes available.

You can find out more about this year's php|tek conference on its main site and more details on the Hackthon here.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new episode of their PHP Abstract podcast series - Matthew Turland with a book review of Packt's "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects".

Today's special guest is Matthew Turland (Elazar to those of you who hang out on the #phpc channel on irc.freenode.net) Matt has been building PHP applications since 2002. [...] Today, Matt is going to review PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects from Packt Publishing.

You know the drill - there's three ways to grab the PHP goodness: the mp3, the in-page player and, the most convenient, subscribing to their feed and getting the latest episodes hand-delivered.