Brandon Savage has posted the second article in his RabbitMQ+PHP series today with a look at publishing messages to the queue. (Part one is here)

Now that we understand the basics behind RabbitMQ, it's time for us to start working with it. The first step in working with RabbitMQ is to begin sending messages to the exchange so that they can be queued. In RabbitMQ parlance, the "producer" is responsible for "publishing" the messages to the exchange.

He includes the code you'll need to use the AMQP PHP extension to connect with the RabbitMQ server and select a channel. He also shows how to set up an "exchange" and "queue" and bind them to each other. Finally, there's the one line of code that uses the routing key value to push a message into the waiting service.

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.

php|architect Magazine has officially announced the introduction of a new publishing format for their magazine. Readers are no longer tied to just PDF versions - they can now opt for ePUB editions of the magazine starting with this month's issue (and retroactively!).

Still, even though PDF was a less popular format in 2002 than it has become today, it was a much easier choice for us when the only way to read an electronic publication was to sit in front of a computer. The advent of portable e-book readers demanded that we consider other formats; as a result, about six months ago we started a skunkworks program, spearheaded by our very own Keith Casey, to create ePub and MOBI versions of our magazine.

Thanks to an ePUB document generator, the magazine can now be dynamically generated into three formats - the usual PDF file, an ePUB edition and a MOBI edition for the Kindle fans out there. All subscribers have been upgraded to this plan - the Premium subscription - and are able to start pulling down these editions today.

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.

On PHPClasses.org there's a recent book review of a new offering from Wrox Publishing - "Expert PHP and MySQL" (by Andrew Curioso, Ronald Bradford, Patrick Galbraith). Udi Mosayev is the reviewer.

This book is for developers who have worked on several projects and have some good experience developing with PHP and MySQL, as well developers who develop high-demand applications or applications that handle lots of data and processing. OOP experience is recommended.

He talks about the subjects he specifically likes that the book covers like opcode caching, general caching techniques, Gearman and memcached.

The techniques discussed in this book are used by large sites that we all know like Digg, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube and more. If its good for them, I believe it is good for you too.

Lorna Mitchell has posted a review she's done of the Packt Publishing book "RESTful PHP Web Services" (by Samisa Abeysinghe).

Overall it was well-written (with only as many spelling mistakes as any other PHP book) and clearly organised. [...] Very few services that claim to be RESTful actually are, which makes writing anything along these lines very tricky, however I did feel the author could have been clearer about why having a single URL and a parameter for which action should be performed, doesn't fit well. We do get a sense of excitement about services as ways to "glue together" bits of data on the net, and the possibilities of exposing and consuming information in this way.

She talks about the quality of the technical content (including the "very thorough" non-framework examples and Zend Framework example) and some of the extra baggage she felt it could do without - specifically the overhead that adding the Zend Framework could add.

On the Ibuildings blog today Marcello Duarte has a new review of the Packt Publishing book "PHP5 CMS Framework Development" (by Martin Brampton).

Martin left Mambo (before they announced to drop support for PHP4 last September) to write his own CMS and "evolve out of the Mambo history", by taking advantage of PHP5 OO enhancements. The result is Aliro: a CMS, a framework and an extension project with traits and genes of the Mambo family. Aliro code is used throughout the book to support and illustrate his presentation.

Topics of the different chapters include basic CMS system needs, organizing code, extensions and editing and presenting content.

Stoyan has once again been tasked with helping Packt Publishing find the best open-source PHP CMS for 2008:

It's that time of the year again. Time to cast my vote as part of the jury in Packt's open-source awards, category "PHP CMS".

He includes some of the criteria he'll be using to judge based on including the list of features it includes, how quality is the code, what sort of state the documentation is in and how much of a community it has around it.

Packt Publishing has made an announcement about a new book that's just been released - "MediaWiki Skins Design" (by Richard Carter).

From their release notes:

This book takes users through customizing their MediaWiki skin. It is full of practical examples of MediaWiki skinning techniques, and provides a clear explanation of how MediaWiki skinning works and the necessary template and CSS customizations required to completely alter MediaWiki's appearance.

The book has appeal for both web developers and wiki administrators by helping them update the look and feel of their MediaWiki site. You can find more information on the book on its page on the Packt Publishing website.

David Goodwin has posted a new book review of a PHP book offered by Packt Publishing (released Sept 22, 2007) - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects" by Shu-Wai Chow.

Some time ago, Packt publishing sent me this book to review. Here it is, being somewhat overdue!

He talks about the book's contents - the different chapters detailing the different services' APIs, the protocols that are used to talk to those services and the data formats your scripts would have to be able to talk in to communicate. He recommends the book to those looking to get started with mashups specifically, but warns that in some places the book tends to "reinvent the wheel" rather than using classes/packages that already exist.