Kana Yeh has posted a review of Ivo Jansch's "Guide to Enterprise PHP Development" (from php|architect):

I consider myself to be a newbie when it comes to profesional PHP web development. Sure I know how to CRUD, procedural-, object oriented development on a limited level, frameworks, functional designs, database designs, technical designs (all on a limited level). So yes, I know something but is my knowledge enough to be able to stand in the world of the real professionals? Therefore I might think and mention some stuff that is not related to enterprise. Please correct me whenever you come across such err.

She frames the review in light of what the titles of the book (the "enterprise" portion mainly) suggests about its contents. She talks about the contents of the book - descriptions of a software life cycle, architecture, quality assurance and optimization. In some of her final thoughts she mentions the quality of the book and some of the things it does well. (There also a Dutch summary for those Dutch PHPers out there.)

Dave Marshall is having a contest to give away a few copies of the "Job Hunter's Handbook" (by Michael Kimsal) - all you need to do is sign up:

I've got a couple of copies of Php|architect's PHP Job Hunter's Handbook to give away, the only catch is you have to sign up to PHPPositions' feed via email. It's managed by Feedburner, so it can be trusted and you wont get any spam, just super smashing great php jobs in the UK.

If you'd like to find out more about the book (or to order your own copy), head over to the book's page on the php|architect website. Normal price is $27 CAD for Print/PDF and just $23 CAD for the PDF.

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.

Padraic Brady has released chapter one and chapter two of his "Surviving the Deep End" Zend Framework book:

As many of you know, the book is available online without charge. [...] Let me know your thoughts, and post any general comments or questions on the book or website here. I'll be adding a general end-of-page comment system to the mix during the next day or two so posting general comments here is a temporary stopgap.

The first chapter is just an introduction looking at what the book will cover and what the framework's all about. Chapter two gets a bit more in depth, looking at the architecture of the Zend Framework and details things like routing and how it implements MVC.

Michelangelo van Dam has put together a book review of the Addison-Wesley/Pearson book "Zend Studio for Eclipse - Developer's Guide":

This book is in my opinion a beginner's guide into using ZSE, aiming at PHP developers that have a knowledge of general concepts like versioning, debugging and refactoring. I personally was hoping to see advanced settings to tune the IDE into a powerful developer's tool, but it was merely a basic explanation with the correct terminology for a product that I've been using well over two years now (yes, I was also beta-tester for it).

He keeps it short but does note that the book can be a good asset for those just getting into Eclipse but if you're already past that level, it wouldn't hold much for you.

Padraic Brady has made a post about the upcoming Zend Framework book (and website) he'll be releasing in January:

In January, the new book will commence its long awaited publishing process online. The book has been a long time coming since I started posting my now infamous tutorial series which focused on the practical side of creating an application more so than acting as a reference book. The book is being made available free of charge online funded by donations and some advertising.

The book will include the ability to comment on chapters (with changes to be included in possible revisions) via a jQuery-powered commenting system that allows for thoughts to be added to each paragraph. You can see the website in this screenshot.

Mike Lively has a new review of a book from Packt Publshing (authored by Martin Brampton) - PHP5 CMS Framework Development.

Upon reading through the book I have found that it gives an excellent case study of Martin Brampton's approach to CMS design and implementation. [...] One might be concerned that the ideas in this book are slanted towards how Brampton decided to implement various aspects of Aliro. While it is true that much of the book uses code directly out of Aliro, I feel that he did take the time to make sure he explained the reasons for the design and development decisions he made.

The more he read through the book, the more Mike felt like it was a case study of the Aliro CMS rather than a true look at CMS building in PHP5. He (Mike) lays out some of the contents of the book including the look at common CMS functionality, code organization, extensions and internationalization.

In this new post to his blog Padraic Brady takes a quick look at a book by Julien Pauli and Guillaume Poncon - "Zend Framework: Bien developper en PHP".

Weighing in at around 450 pages, the contents table is replete with all the topics one would expect including chapters on MVC in the Zend Framework, all the typical components, and appendices (a lot of appendices!) on topics like MVC Theory, Subversion, Databases, Object Oriented Programming, Testing with PHPUnit, etc. It's a very complete book that should be suitable even for absolute beginners to PHP web application frameworks, or anyone visiting from Ruby/Python/Java.

You can find the book at a local (French) bookseller or it can be ordered online from someplace like Amazon.fr.

The NETTUTS blog has this new tutorial posted (including a screencast) showing how to make a web application similar to the Address Book on Apple's OS X operating system.

As we all know, WordPress is so extensive that you can use it for nearly anything. There are even articles on sites with crazy titles such as 101 alternative uses for WordPress. So I thought, hey, why not? I bet a lot of people want to create their own Web Apps, and essentially WordPress can do that for you. In this video tutorial, we're going to make an online Address Book.

Building on a WordPress base and including jQuery and a Live Search Plugin, they create the multi-pane look and feel, styled largely with CSS. The end result shows your address groups, the members of that group and the selected member's information in the far right pane.

As always, the complete source can be downloaded.

WebReference.com has another excerpt from the Addison-Wesley book "PHP and MySQL Web Development" covering the connection between PHP and MySQL using their example from previous chapters.

In this chapter, we explain how to access the Book-O-Rama database from the Web using PHP. You learn how to read from and write to the database and how to filter potentially troublesome input data.

The chapter looks at setting up the connection, choosing the table, running queries against it, getting the information from the results and using prepared statements to do it all in a bit safer way. They also briefly touch on other interface methods (like the PEAR MDB2 library).