Rob Allen has posted his review of another PHP-related book from Packt Publishing, "Object-oriented Programming with PHP5":

Packt Publishing recently sent me a couple of books to review, so let's start with Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder. According to the introduction, the book is intended for beginners to intermediate PHP5 programmers and the first chapter has a good introduction to what object oriented programming is and why you would want to use it.

He glosses over the first few chapters of the book (introductory stuff mostly) and points out three others specifically - Chapter 5 covering reflection and unit testing, Chapter 6 covering the SPL and Chapter 9 dealing with SimpleXML and DOM.

Ken Guest has reviewed one of the PHP offerings from Packt Publishing and written by Hasin Hayder - Object-oriented Programming with PHP5.

Putting the aspects of Hayder's grasp of the English language aside, the book is rather good as an introduction to the various technologies that it covers.

He points out a few things of note - the beginner OOP chapters (only made for the newbies out there), the contents of the main OOP chapter and the good section on PHPUnit and unit testing. He also has a few suggestions of things that could make the book a bit better, including a personal suggestion on code formating and braces.

DevShed has posted the first part of a new series looking at benchmarking performance in your PHP applications.

If you're anything like me, you have had your head spinning with questions [...] these and other dilemmas (add your own to the list) sometimes make peace of mind a nearly impossible goal.

The tutorial talks about a few simple methods for running benchmark data including the use of microtime(), an OOP method and wrapping the call inside a method of their class.

Mike Weiner has put together an article for PHPBuilder.com that's posted today showing a bit more object-oriented solution to validating the user submitted data in your forms:

Whether it is for database submission, emailing, or for some other purpose, forms represent the primary means of enabling a user to send data to an application. As a result, it is important to have control over the data collected by your forms, which will aid in the creation of streamlined, error-free applications.

He lays out the validation method in a graphic going with a generic validation class that then calls the various validation methods (like phone or email) as needed. The "validation set" manages which validations are to be run on which form elements. Example code for each of the bits making up the structure and the implementation are provided.

David Goodwin has posted a book review of a book put out by Packt Publishing, "Object Oriented Programming with PHP5" (from Hasin Hayder).

After an email out of the blue from someone at Packt publishing, here's a review of "Object-Orientated Programming with PHP5" I don't think I've done a book review before, so apologies in advance if it's not structured in any logical manner.

He's broken it up into a few lists to make it very straight forward and easy to see if it's the book for you - the pros, the cons, the contents of the book and a random code sample (this one showing the Decorator pattern in action).

New on the Developer Tutorials blog today is this post offering up a few ideas (five of them) on how they think you can become a better programmer.

In this post, I'll outline five ways to be a better developer, improve your productivity, write less code and achieve more with your web applications.There's always more to learn when it comes to PHP development. New core functions, new frameworks, new design patterns, new code documentation styles. Here are some of the best ways you can become a better PHP developer.

His five suggestions are:

• Read the manual
• Browse through some code
• Learn a new framework
• Research
• Learn OOP

I can understand where he's coming from on all but the third one - frameworks are nice, but it's more important to get the fundamentals down first before making a framework some of your first experience.

To finish up their series looking at using the Yahoo! web service search functionality in a PHP5 application, DevShed has posted this look at integrating the search functionality into a preexisting application.

In simple terms, my plan will consist of creating some compact and modular PHP 5 classes, which will define a few basic methods for working with the different web services offered by Yahoo!.

They take the code they created from before (earlier parts of the series) and format it to fit into its own standalone class that can be included anywhere in an application. They create the class so it can search not only the normal results but it can also pull in the data from the video search Yahoo! offers as well.

Terry Chay, a popular speaker at many of the PHP conferences and photog to the geek chic crowd in San Francisco, will be speaking at the upcoming PHP Meetup for the SF PHP group. He'll be giving a talk titled "OOps! The PHP Fear and Loathing Guide to OO Design".

How does the PHP developer in the trenches create powerful object-orientation code? By doing what the PHP's architects did, of course: cherry picking the most pragmatic of OOP principles and patterns! This talk is targeted at the PHP developer who has basic knowledge of PHP OOP syntax but wants to find out where OOP principles can fit into a program.

If you'd like to attend, head over to the meetup page for the event and let them know you're coming. It'll be happening at the CNet Network offices February 7th @ 7pm.