On the PHPWomen blog today there's a new book review of SitePoint's latest major PHP publication - "PHP Master" (by Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik and Matthew Turland).

At 357 pages (375 including index), this book provides a thorough grounding in the key topics todays PHP developer should strive to know, and know well. The back cover ambitiously states that the book is "guaranteed to take your PHP skills to the next level". Keep reading to find out whether or not I agree.

She walks you through the contents of the book, noting that, despite her being an experienced developer, there were still things that she found new.

Despite the stated demographic, I think this book has a lot to offer novice developers. It would be a real challenge to properly digest and understand the wide range of topics covered, but an achievable and worthwhile one nonetheless. [...] If you're still undecided, my advice is buy the book - you won't regret it.

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 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.

As is mentioned in this new post to the SitePoint blogs, a new book has been released (by SitePoint press, naturally) about "writing cutting-edge PHP code" by a few well known authors in the PHP community - Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik and Matthew Turland.

Savvy PHP web developers can now keep ahead of the game and ensure that their PHP code is safe, secure, and well-structured for the future with the latest release from SitePoint: "PHP Master: Write Cutting-edge Code" by Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik, and Matthew Turland.

The book covers a wide range of topics (somewhat replacing SitePoint's usual "anthology" type of book) including:

• An introduction to OOP
• Working with databases
• Creating and working with APIs
• Design patterns
• Security
• Automated testing

As part of a special offer, you can pick up your print+ebook bundle for the price of just the book, about $40 USD. If you'd like a sample before purchasing, they've posted three sample chapters.

The crew over at SitePoint have introduced a new PHP-specific resource that's looking to provide a good resource for those looking for community info and tutorials - PHPMaster.com.

PHPMaster is the latest and greatest in the SitePoint family, dedicated to bringing you the highest quality in tutorials from some of the web's best PHP Developers, as well as news and information on events in the PHP Community.

Tutorials posted so far include:

• Migrate from the MySQL Extension to PDO
• Monitoring File Integrity
• From Zero to Cloud: Settings up an EC2 Sandbox - part one, part two
• Why You Should Use Bcrypt to Hash Stored Passwords

On the SitePoint podcast, there's a new episode with Lorna Mitchell where she and host Louis Simoneau talk about taking your PHP to the next level, some of her work in Open Source and her involvement in their upcoming advanced PHP book.

Episode 129 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Lorna Mitchell (@Lornajane) one of a team of 3 co-authors working on an upcoming release for SitePoint, an advanced book on PHP.

You can either listen to this latest episode using the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. Of course, you can always subscribe to their podcast feed and get this and other new shows as they're released.

On the Zend Developer Zone today Cal Evans points out a podcast he thinks the software developers out there should give a listen to - SitePoint's latest "Six Pixels of Seperation" episode, How to Get Serious About Your Creativity.

The interview with Steven was Episode #251 of Six Pixels, "How to Get Serious About Your Creativity". I really enjoyed the episode and since creativity is a big part of software development, I think you will too.

As with most podcasts, you can either listen to the episode via an in-page player or you can download the mp3 to listen at your convenience.

SitePoint.com has been posting a series of excerpts from a book they've recently release a revised edition of - "Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL". Here's the list so far:

• The Introduction
• Installation
• Introducing MySQL
• Introducing PHP
• Publishing MySQL Data on the Web

There's lots more to come, so keep an eye on SitePoint's PHP & MySQL Tutorials section for more as their published.

PageChain.net has posted a list of some "great places to go to" to learn PHP right now - some resources out on the web that can help you get started, provide examples and give you community to support you in your development.

Here are some resources to help you not only learn PHP, but also reference PHP information should you ever need it. This list isn't exhaustive, however, it should provide you with a lot of help when you need your PHP fix.

Some of the sites included in their list include:

• W3Schools PHP Tutorials
• Good PHP Tutorials
• PHPFreaks
• ONLamp

The PHPClasses.org website has a new book review of SitePoint's latest PHP-related release, "The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips":

As PHP developers, we commonly resort to browsing the Web for people with similar programming problems. Now that we have The PHP Anthology, why should we? While the book certainly does not cover everything, there is something for everyone, and even the few sections you find useful make it all worthwhile.

He talks about the book's target audience, the quality of the examples it provides and some of his suggestions on how the book could have been even better.