Stefan Mischook notes today that the videos he offers, including several on PHP can now be purchased as a set from his site.

I've had many request for access to the videos either on a DVD or in a downloadable format for viewing offline. So after many months of brushing it off, I now have the videos for you.

The download version will cost you about $20 USD and the DVD is around $30 USD. Of course, you're still free to watch them online as many times as you'd like.

With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.

With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.

Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.

The mystery has been relealed - the php|architect folks have posted about their secret today - a discount on single issues of 30%.

Seasons greetings everyone! The first of two surprises from us today is a great opportunity to combine our recent drop of all DRM protection on our PDFs with an awesome 30% discount on our single-issue prices to stock up on all your favourite past issues of php|architect.

This means that single issues are priced at (about) $3.49 CAD for a few days - all you need to do is pick your favorites from their archive, even their most recent issue.

php|architect has announced the return of their free iPod Video with the purchase of every training class promotion. The promotion applies to any of the three courses they offer:

• PHP Essentials
• Zend PHP 5 Certification Training
• Professional PHP Development

This year, to celebrate the launch of our new training website (as well as the new PHP 5 versions of our PHP Essentials and Zend Certification courses), we're upping the ante, and giving away a free iPod Video 30GB with every online training purchase!

You can get complete details for the promotion and the training classes offered from the official promotion page on the php|architect website.

In this brief entry on the ThinkPHP blog (by bjoern), it seems that there's more than just talk about the Zend/Oracle deal.

While reading the tecosystems blog, I stumbled over Steven's entry "The Oracle M&A Q&A: JBoss, Sleepycat and Zend". It seems that at least Oracle's interest in Zend is true: "[...] and in one panel yesterday Zend's Doron Gerstel did little to deny the Oracle interest". Also, it seems that JBoss has been acquired for $485 Mio. by Oracle.

the Q&A mentions that Zend would fit in with their plans as an "in" to the PHP community and a way of increasing their growth in the database markets.