On Dzone.com today Giorgio Sironi has posted what he considers to be some of the most popular Open Source PHP projects of 2011 including Symfony2, Doctrine and HipHop.

This non-scientific analysis of the popular and exciting PHP projects starts from researches on active projects on SourceForge and GitHub; the latter is where most of the collaboration and involvement of PHP developers is today. I've also crowdsourced the question on Twitter to catch projects I wasn't aware of, and I hope to do the same with you.

Other projects included in his list are:

• Symfony2 Components
• Moodle
• Composer and Packagist
• Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress

Have a project you think he missed? Let him know!

Volker Dusch has posted his review of a recent release from SitePoint Press - "PHP Masters - Write Cutting Edge Code".

The book is solid, well written and covers the most important topics that people need to think about when starting off with PHP. It is one of the few PHP book on the market that you can pass on to your trainees/junior developers without having to "unteach" them half of the taught bad practices afterwards. This is a great achievement in my mind and I'd definitely recommend checking it out and passing it on to your trainees and 'junior developers' ... maybe read it first yourself and rip out a few pages in chapter 4.

His "long version" gets into a more complete list of his thoughts on each of the individual chapters (including "object oriented programming", "APIs", "design patterns" and "security"). Overall, he found the book good, but pointed out a few areas where it was lacking. You can find more detail about the book here (or on Amazon here)

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 PHPMaster.com today (disclaimer: PHPMaster is a SitePoint website) Timothy Boronczyk has posted a review of SitePoint's latest offering for PHP developers - Writing Cutting-Edge Code (by Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik and Matthew Turland).

The book was written explicitly to help you becoming a better PHP programmer and is totally awesome. It not only covers advanced PHP coding topics such as object-oriented programming and design patterns, but also periphery topics that are just as important, such as security, performance profiling, and deployment. If you're ready to hang up your novice hat for good and become a professional-level PHP developer, this book is for you.

He goes through and highlights some of the content in the book, chapters covering relational databases, web services, security topics, caching, automated testing, PEAR/PECL....just to name a few.

Using the Slashdot scale of book ratings, where 1 is fit for lining cages and 10 is destined to be a class, I give PHP Master: Write Cutting-Edge Code a very solid 8.5. The content will grow with you and the book is not something you'll read in a weekend and then donate to the library because you have no need for it.

PHP.net has officially announced the release of the first official beta of the PHP 5.4.x series today - PHP 5.4 beta1.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first beta release of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviors. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site.

Features added in this beta include several bug fixes, the addition of a callable typehint, a switch to timezone guessing (UTC is assumed if not set) and the mysql/mysqli/pdo_mysql extensions now use mysqlnd by default. There's a lot of smaller changes too - check out the latest NEWS file for the complete list.

In response to this article from DevShed about creating a "simple and secure login script", Anthony Ferrara has written up this post to help dispel some of the inaccuracies, bad practices and security issues that could result from DevShed's code.

I decided to click the link [in my feed reader] and give the article a read. Not overly shocking was the fact that I didn't find the content of the article to be, how shall I say this..., overly factual. It's not really a "tutorial", but more of a "here's some code that's secure". A quick review of the code found more than one vulnerability, and some significant things that I would change about it (as well as a few "really bad practices").

He walks through each of the files included in the original tutorial - Authenticate.php, Register.php and Logout.php - and talks about things like brute force detection, password verification, registration handling and session serialization. He finishes it off with a list of twelve overall issues he noticed during his work along with solutions for each (usually very simple ones too).

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.

On the Web Builder Zone (a part of DZone.com) Giorgio Sironi take a high-level look at some of the tools you can use for automated code reviews in your projects without you ever having to lift a finger (well, once it's set up, of course).

I'm exploring an approach to automated code review: it's not as precise as the human-based one, but it scales better. [...] All in all, automated code reviews, performed with tools instead of with human intellect, can be a starting point to search for the problematic zones of a codebase. Then the human may come in, since they also have to clean up the code: their intervention was already scheduled.

The tools he mentions (and, in some cases, shows how to install/use) are:

• PHPUnit
• PHP_Depend
• PHP_CodeSniffer
• PHP Mess Detector (pmd)
• the Jenkins job template

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new book review from Keith Casey covering the Karl Fogel book Producing Open Source Software, a guide to organizing and running a successful open source project and its community.

By the time I finished the book a few months later, it rocked my professional world and I couldn't wait to jump into the community fully and completely. To be clear, Karl's book is about the difficulties and challenges of building a team to build a project, but almost all of it is relevant in the building communities in general...

He goes through some of the topics mentioned in the book and highlights three different themes that stood out to him - Political and Social Structure, Communication and one of the most difficult, Managing Volunteers.

So overall, almost every single idea struck me as both blindingly obvious and often missed. And the single best part about this entire book... about 90% of it applies to any project or technical community. Yes, I don't care if you're working on an Open Source project, an internal project, or a commercial shrink-wrapped application. You can use almost any idea from this book and apply it immediately.

In this new post to his blog Robert Basic has a review of a book from php|architect (by Matthew Turland), "Guide to Web Scraping with PHP".

It took me a while to grab myself a copy of Matthew Turland's "Guide to Web Scraping with PHP", but a few weeks ago a copy finally arrived and I had the pleasure of reading it. [...] My overall impression of the book is that it was worth the time and I'm really glad that I bought it. Matthew did a great job explaining all the tools we have at our disposal for writing web scrapers and how to use them.

He talks about the content of a few specific chapters (the HTTP protocol, client libraries you can use and how to prepare documents for parsing) and notes that there's not much bad he can think of about the book:

It is a guide, clear and straight-to-the-point, explaining what tools are there, which one to use and how for writing scrapers and that's exactly what I wanted to know.