On the AjaxRay site today there's a new review of an introductory book from Packt Publishing about unofficial wiki is a BIG try to help in this issue. Besides, recently Packt has published the first book on Kohana "Kohana 3.0 Beginner's Guide". Jason D. Straughan wrote this book for Kohana version 3.x.

The review includes an overall assessment of the book, a detailed description of how the chapters are laid out and some of the complaints he had about the book's contents - a lack of code examples in some places, demos/screenshots pointing out what the framework can really do and the inclusion of some deprecated methods.

Overall, the book is well organized, focused and will be helpful on it's purpose. I felt it's capable to teach Kohana to a new guy, in a smooth way. Yes, there have some printing mistakes, old (because they are changed in new version) function use and some other minor issues, but seems ignorable to me. I'd recommend it for Kohana beginners.

On PHPClasses.org there's a new post reviewing a book from Packt Publishing, "PHP 5 CMS Framework Development" (a second edition) by Martin Brampton.

In this review I focus on the changes between the editions of the book, which are brief and objective, since the core of the work remains the same and with the same quality. [...] In sum, I recommend reading this book to those looking forward to improve their skills in PHP, or intend to create new frameworks. To put it simply, a good book to read, and with new tricks to learn.

He (the reviewer, Alexandre Altair de Melo) briefly looks at these differences between the versions, with the largest being in Chapter 15 - the building of a sample application to apply all of the theory learned in the rest of the book. You can find more information about the book on Packt's website here.

Chris Hartjes has posted a new book review to his blog today of the Packt Publishing release the "CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook". Like many other traditional "cookbook" style books, it provides a set of solutions to common issues CakePHP developers might come across.

personally find the "cookbook" style of books to be the most helpful. They enable me to quickly find answers to the problem "show me how to do something realistic using your tool". Hello World doesn't cut it for the tools I need to use. [...] Like any well-thought-out book, they cover the main components of CakePHP. One of the thing I liked was that you didn't have to necessarily read the book from front-to-back in order to get something from it.

He mentions other positive things about the book - like the chapter on using the command-line tools that come with CakePHP - and one of the negatives (not so much about the book as it is the CakePHP project's choices).

Michelangelo van Dam has posted a new book review today about an offering from from Packt Publishing - CMS Design Using PHP and jQuery.

After receiving the book I started reading it. But right from the start the author displayed bad practices and mis-use of PHP. Reading the book from front to back, the author Kae Verens (@kae_verens) has confronted me with bad use of variables (like $a, $b, $c), bad use of PHP structures and a complete wrong approach of using JavaScript, where JavaScript should enrich an application instead of incorporating business logic.

In his "good" category fell things like the interesting variety of jQuery plugins mentioned and how the CMS example was broken up into easily digestible chunks. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the book falls into his "bad" and "ugly" category" including the structure of the application, the quality of the code and the lack of filtering/validation that was done on input.

Chris Hartjes has posted his review of the Packt Publishing book "PHP 5 Social Networking" they had asked him to review.

I'm glad I decided to take a look at this book. It's pretty dense at 450+ pages, but it really does work you through from start to finish how to build a small social networking site in PHP. Okay, it's about dinosaurs, but let's not quibble. I'm not into long-depth book reviews, so we can talk about what I liked about this book.

He likes the consistency of the book's approach to the subject and points out that it promotes refactoring and improving code over striking out and using something new and trendy. He also mentions their emphasis on security. The one thing he didn't like about the book was a simple one - there were no unit tests to back up any of the code in the book.

New from Query7.com today there's a book review of a release from Packt Publishing titled "PHP5 CMS Framework Development" covering the creation of a custom CMS system from the ground up.

PHP5 CMS Framework Development is a 322 page book that covers all aspects of creating a full featured content management system (CMS) in PHP5. The author Martin Brampton has a history of developing extensions for the Mambo and Joomla CMS projects. He became lead developer of the CMS Mambo before starting his own CMS, Aliro. The book is split up into 14 chapters. The first is an introduction to CMS and PHP5 concepts and the remaining 13 each look at a key feature of the CMS.

The review covers the contents of the book in a bit more depth, talking about a few chapters specifically and how they felt it was overall a "great learning experience". He mentions a few negatives about the book, however - the code examples are all pulled from an existing CMS (Aliro), the conventions used in them and the heavy use of singletons. He still recommends it if you're looking to write your own CMS, though. It still provides some good insight into the methods and pieces that make them up.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, the voting state of the Packt 2010 Open Source Awards has officially started and you can cast your vote in one of many categories (and maybe win a prize for your efforts).

The nomination stage is now closed and voting has begun in the 2010 Open Source Awards. [...] You can cast your vote here: http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home/voting-stage.

The categories for the awards this year are:

• Open Source CMS Award
• Hall of Fame CMS
• Most Promising Open Source Project
• Open Source E-Commerce Applications
• Open Source JavaScript Libraries
• Open Source Graphics Software

If you want more information or to cast your vote for any of the projects in these categories, go over to the Packt voting page and get your opinion heard.

In a new post to his blog today Chris Hartjes has a book review of the Packt Publishing book "CodeIgniter 1.7: Professional Development".

When I read a book about a programming framework, I'm expecting to see that they start off with the basics of using the framework, then keep expanding on the abilities of the framework. By the end of the book, you should be able to build something OTHER than the example application (if they provide one). [...] This book starts with the basics of the framework, and patiently builds on the concepts you previously learned. Good, clear examples of how to do things.

He mentions two of the interesting things the book touches on that some introductory books tend to leave out - coverage of extending the framework itself and how to worry about scalability. Overall he recommends the book to anyone looking to do CodeIgniter development.

Ian Barber has posted a book review to his blog today covering the Packt Publishing book Expert PHP5 Tools from Dirk Merkel.

[It] is a tour through a variety of processes and systems that the author suggests should be in use by any serious PHP developer. [...] The book is aimed squarely at developers, though most of the advice only really applies if implemented by an entire team, so the natural audience is team leads or one man bands, where decisions regarding coding standards or framework usage are under their control.

He talks about the quality of the writing and how well the topics are covered and how each chapter seems to read like an in-depth tutorial on the given topic (things like phpDocumentor, Eclipse, Subversion, frameworks and UML). He does mention one or two things he would have liked to see out of the book that weren't there like more of a description on problems/issues that popped up using the tools.

On the Tech Chorus blog there's a new book review of a Packt Publishing book called "PHP 5 e-commerce Development" (by Michael Peacock). The reviewer covers some of the contents of the book as well as two main points - who should read it and what they could have done better.

You should read the book if you are learning PHP and new to e-commerce. Beginners trying to utilize out of the box software like Drupal CMS or OSCommerce tend to be frustrated sooner or later.

He discusses the contents of some of the chapters - building pages, creating whis lists, payment gateway integration. He also mentions a few things that the author might have done a bit better at including taking his claims of a "killer framework" down a few notches. He recommends taking all advice in the book with a grain of salt.