InfoWorld/DeveloperWorld has posted a list of eight power tools (IDEs) they suggest to any PHP developer looking for something more than just the standard text editors.

In this article, we examine eight IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use.

There's a summary scorecard on the first page of the article if you want to jump straight to the good stuff, but the pages following that will give you much more information about each of the options - the good and the pad points. According to their overall scores, though, Eclipse PDT and Zend Studio tied it up for the highest rankings.

Robert Basic has posted a review of the "jQuery 1.3 with PHP" book from Packt Publishing (by Kae Verens):

Although I never wrote about jQuery here, I use it quite often and can pull of nice tricks with it. [...] his book is aimed at PHP developers who have met only a few times with JavaScript and jQuery, but I believe even a novice programmer can gain knowledge from it '" just be warned, the PHP examples are here for the sake of the examples only; about which the author warns throughout the book. [...] The examples in the book are well explained and commented!

Robert also mentions some of the contents of the book - the introduction, a "quick tricks" chapter and more detailed chapters covering things like form validation, making a calendar and cropping/resizing images. He includes links to the table of contents and sample chapter if you'd like an example of what the book is like.

Danne Lundqvist has posted a review of the Packt Publishing book "Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Developing":

In return they asked me to write what I thought about it. I have had it lying on my desk for a while but haven't had time to read it more carefully. Nevertheless I have actually used it every now and then. Now, after reading a bit more the last few days, I can finally give my opinion on the book.

He comes at it from a perspective of technology books in general, how they can get outdated quickly, and how he was pleasantly surprised by how this book defies that. He briefly covers the contents of the book, touching on concepts like the "Fat model, skinny controller" and best practices for view handling. He recommends it more to beginners with the Zend Framework than experienced users.

Ken Guest has posted a book review of a new release from Packt Publishing - "jQuery 1.3 with PHP" (by Kae Verens).

This is the first book sent to me from Packt where I wasn't left dizzy from trying to understand just what it is the author was trying to get across. It looks like their proof-reader was awake for this one - totally awesome. [...] "jQuery 1.3 with PHP" is aimed "for PHP application developers who want to improve their user interfaces through jQuery's capabilities and responsiveness".

Ken mentions the main part of the book, the ten "quick tricks" and detailed sections looking at things like form validation, image manipulation, file management and writing your own jQuery plugins.

It was good to see Kae suggesting use of the PEAR Validate package (or similar) in the Forms and Forms Validation chapter (chapter 4). I had to wonder if there was a PEAR package for creating and shunting down jQuery validation rules to the client - and found that there isn't.

Overall Ken found the book "easy to read" and understandable and recommends it as good reading material for those wanting to combine this powerful duo.

You can also read Kae's own post here.

New on his blog, Federico Cargnelutti has posted his own review of a new book from Packt publishing - "Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development".

Zend Framework is one of the most popular and hottest open-source frameworks being used today. The number of books about Web development using Zend Framework has increased over the last couple of years.

He points out that the book isn't aimed at those just starting out with the Zend Framework. Readers should have a good grasp of the basics under their belt before starting. The book gives you a well-rounded look at developing Zend Framework-based applications and, as Federico notes, it's a "very well-written, nicely structured and full of highly practical advice" and that the book met his expectations.

Following some of his previous comments about the state of a certain publishing company, Keith Casey has come back with a a list of recommendations of books he'd suggest to both budding and seasoned developers alike.

I had a number of people ask what books I did I recommend. To be honest, that's one of the easiest questions I've gotten in a while. [...] There are about 5 books that I believe should be in nearly any software developer's library.

He actually includes two lists - one that's technology-agnostic (with titles like "The Pragmatic Programmer" and "Joel on Software") and a more software development centric list including "The Mythical Man Month" and "Producing Open Source Software".

You can also check out some of Travis Swicegood's opinions on reading material.

On his TechChorus blog Sudheer has posted his own review of the Packt Publishing book "Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development" (by Keith Pope).

The Zend Framework community needed a book covering version 1.8+. Version 1.8 brought new notable features. Zend_Application is one among them. Zend_Application introduced object oriented bootstrapping in applications that otherwise used a procedural script. A bunch of users had difficulty understanding how to set up their applications to make use of the new bootstrapping component. All of them have seem to understand it well now, thanks to support in the official mailing lists and IRC channel.

He looks at the book and how helps to teach some of the fundamentals, like the basics of the model/view/controller design pattern, along with some of the more advanced topics as they walk the reader through the development of an online storefront application. He touches on some of the good points of the book as well as a few things that it could have done better (like the usual editing mistakes Packt is becoming known for). Overall, though, he gives it a good rating.

Both Robert Basic and Ekerete (on the Avnet Labs site) have posted reviews of one of the more recent offerings from Packt Publishing on development with the Zend Framework - Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development.

In Robert's review he talks about some of the usual concerns with Packt books (the poor quality of the writing) and looks at the contents of some of the chapters - walking you through the process of building a sample application. He's recommend the book to those just starting out with the Zend Framework.

On the Avnet Labs site Ekerete agrees with most of Robert's comments but disagrees on a few points the author made on recommended ways to handle things like the application's models.

Ken Guest is joining several other bloggers in reviewing the "PHP Team Development" book from Packt Publishing (by Samisa Abeysinghe) and coming to the same conclusions as they did.

Split into seven chapters, all equally sprinkled with phrases that are disjointly written and that don't get a point across, and some that make you think the book was written using some speech-to-text software ("Vendor locking" anybody?) , this book which "is for PHP developers who work in teams on complex projects" has given me an aversion to seeing three little words printed alongside each other ("the PHP code").

He mentions some of the huge omissions on things like code sniffing/syntax checking, unit testing, PEAR, etc (and there's a lot missing). He also points out what he sees as one of the largest problems of the book:

The book focuses on what the author thinks and his thoughts on the subject are written in such a manner, that once you put in the immense effort in trying to understand what he is attempting to communicate, that you are left with the impression that there are no alternatives; that X & Y & Z are the true and tested ways of doing things in PHP and there are no two ways about it.

Overall, Ken wouldn't recommend the book to much of anyone and suggests that the money put towards the cost of the book would be better spent on something with much more return.

Following up on Lorna Mitchell's and Brandon Savage's reviews on the Packt Publishing book "PHP Team Development", Keith Casey has added a few of his own thoughts on the quality and content inside.

Okay, okay, it's just a poor sentence structure and I'm being mean picking at one some little mistake. Except that it's not one little mistake. The book is filled with glaring mistakes like this. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that I average 1-2 typos/post so maybe I don't have room to talk. Of course, there is one difference: I don't have an editor. I don't have someone with the sole duty of reviewing my writing and correcting it. Packt Publishing does... well, at least I thought they did.

He goes on to mention a few of the other weak points about the book including its presentation of MVC as a "silver bullet", the recommendation of CVS and the severe lack of PHP-related topics. He sums up his feelings on the book in one sentence:

Overall, I can't recommend this book to anyone. [...] Further, as of this book, I am no longer willing to receive or review books from Packt Publishing [because of it].