Lorna Mitchell has posted a book review of an O'Reilly publication (by Steve Francia) - "MongoDB and PHP".

The tone of the book is quite informal and approachable [...]. This book also does a great job of deferring to other resources where that is appropriate; in particular where some features of MongoDB will change rapidly and the online documentation is well-maintained. [...] There is no hiding from the very lovely, very technical, features available in MongoDB and although this book doesn't drill into all the possible use cases of each one, it does cover some advanced topics such as sharding and GridFS which was completely new to me.

Her review of the book is positive, noting that it takes a topic that, despite possibly being overwhelming for someone new to it, makes it approachable and easy to digest. You can find out more about this book on the O'Reilly website.

Rafael Dohms has posted a new review of a book that focuses on helping you create better, more readable code - "The Art of Readable Code" (Dustin Boswell, Trevor Foucher, O'Reilly). This is isn't about "pretty code" as much as it is manageable, easy to follow structures and logic flows.

"The Art of Readable Code" was written by Dustin Bowell and Trevor Foucher and basically focuses on concepts and suggestions to make you code not just readable, but comprehendible by other developers, or as the author's suggest, yourself in six months. Code readability is a topic that I truly believe the PHP community does not focus enough on and i really wanted a look at this book to see what kind of ideas it had and what I could do my best to bring to the attention of other developers.

The book is language-agnostic and provides ideas that developers should keep in mind when doing their development - clear variable names, making comments that make sense, refactoring tips and hints for implementing your ideas in code. He recommends the book to any developer (in any language) to help them make code that will stand the test of time and be easier to manage/understand in the future.

Brandon Savage has posted a review of one of O'Reilly Publishing's latest PHP-related offerings - PHP: The Good Parts.

My overall impression of the book was disappointment. To some degree I was hoping for a book that would show me special parts of PHP that perhaps I had overlooked; instead, the book focuses on a basic introduction to PHP, and one that isn't very detailed in the first place. The book's focus as an introduction also fails to teach basic programming concepts, meaning that non-programmers will not find the book to be useful.

He was disappointed in some of the specifics of the book as well - things that, while not technically false, might not be totally correct either. Overall, though, he didn't feel the book would be a valuable resource to other developers out there and that it was only average.

O'Reilly Publishing has just released a new PHP book for those looking to get to the "heart of the language" the fastest - PHP: The Good Parts.

Get past all the hype about PHP and dig into the real power of the language. This book explores the most useful features of PHP and how they can speed up the web development process, and explains why the most commonly used PHP elements are often misused or misapplied. You'll learn which parts add strength to object-oriented programming, and how to use certain features to integrate your application with databases.

You can see the full table of contents on their page for the book including beginner topics like functions and variables all the way out to security, advanced goodies and PHP 5.3.

Carsten Lucke has posted about the release of the third edition of O'Reilly's "PHP5 Cookbook" ("PHP5 Kochbuch") German edition:

The book is published by O'Reilly - written by David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg, Stephan Schmidt, Ulrich Speidel, Carsten Lucke and Matthias Brusdeylins. The German PHP 5 cookbook in a new and completely revised 3rd edition with information on the new PHP 5.3. Collected knowledge of American and German PHP experts. It contains hundreds of well-approved "recipes" including explanations of the new PHP features.

Carsten and Matthias Brusdeylins reworked the third edition and revised quite a bit of it for this new release (including adding some PHP 5.3 examples). The book comes in at a hefty 879 pages and more information can be found on the O'Reilly website.

The O'Reilly School of Technology now offers a series of PHP certification classes developers can attend to learn more about PHP and SQL on a variety of projects.

The PHP/SQL Programming Certificate Series is comprised of four courses covering beginning to advanced PHP programming, beginning to advanced database programming using the SQL language, database theory, and integrated Web 2.0 programming using PHP and SQL on the Unix/Linux mySQL platform.

They currently offer three courses:

• Introduction to PHP
• PHP/SQL 1: Introduction to Database Programming
• PHP/SQL 2: Relational Theory and Logical Design

Another class will be released in December 2008 - PHP/SQL 3: Seamless Web 2.0 Integration . The classes come it at a bit under $400 USD and include access to an online sandbox for testing (complete with web server, unix-shell and database installations). Completion of all four courses earns the student a certification from the University of Illinois's Professional Development department.

The Zend Developer Zone has a review posted of a report that the O'Reilly Radar group put out concerning Open Source software and its place in the Enterprise business today.

It's not often that a report generates this much excitement but "Open Source in the Enterprise" says a lot of what needs to be said to C-Levels considering making the jump to Open Source.

Cal mentions one of the 6 factors that are driving more and more businesses to open source software (like PHP) - the community that surrounds them (how vibrant is it?). He also points out the concept of "vendor lock-in" and how open source can help companies accomplish it by ridding themselves of proprietary software. The report can be gotten from the O'Reilly Radar group for $399 for an individual copy or $995 for a sitewide license.

No Starch Press has officially released their PHP title "Wicked Cool PHP" (Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems).

Here's a bit from the press release:

Wicked Cool PHP [...] is a different breed of PHP book. It's made specifically for the developer who wants to know how to get things done without mucking around and wasting a lot of time. This is not a weighty PHP complete reference or bible that threatens to take down your bookshelf and the rest of the bookcase. This is a book for coders to pick up and use, not wade through.

It provides the reader with "76 immediately useful PHP scripts" that do a variety of things like send/receive email notifications, do some web scraping, track users with cookies and sessions and use web services like SOAP.

You can find out more about the book on this page on the O'Reilly website. The book will officially hit the stands February 15th.

In a new article on DevShed, the spotlight is on putting Apache "in jail" with chroot, but they also include a section on setting up PHP to work inside it.

In this conclusion to a six-part series on Apache configuration and installation, you will learn how to use chroot to put Apache in jail, how to prepare PHP to work in jail, and more.

The article is an excerpt from the O'Reilly book "Apache Security" and shows how to get PHP to cooperate by installing it normally and then setting up some shared libraries to be used in the jail. They note one common problem - an issue with PHP accessing sendmail - that can be solved easily with a change to php.ini for the setup.

The PHP Community is buzzing about a new article, posted on the O'Reilly Ruby blog, about how the author (Derek Silvers of cdbaby.com) made the decision that Ruby on Rails just wasn't right for the project he was working on.

Back in January 2005, I announced on the O'Reilly blog that I was going to completely scrap over 100,000 lines of messy PHP code in my existing CD Baby (cdbaby.com) website, and rewrite the entire thing in Rails, from scratch. [...] The first few months showed good progress, and Jeremy could not have been more amazing, twisting the deep inner guts of Rails to make it do things it was never intended to do.

But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails' preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It's do-able with a lot of glue. But it's damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you're really doing this.)

Recounting the rest of the story, Derek mentions the turning point ("Is there anything Rails can do that PHP CAN'T do?") and the speed at which they were able to make up for the two years of lost development time. To helps others make a decision for their project, he also includes seven reasons why he made the decision to switch back, including:

• Our entire company's stuff was in php: don't underestimate integration
• Don't want what i don't need
• I love SQL
• Programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because *you* are better

There's also been several bloggers in the PHP community that have responded to the article:

• Elizabeth Naramore - "Derek Sivers' Article on RoR vs PHP"
• Paul Jones - "Is there anything Rails can do that PHP cannot do? *No.*"
• Terry Chay - "Why PHP triumphs over Ruby"
• Jeff Moore - "Ruby versus PHP or There and Back Again"