December
2006
Great new PHP book
Ok, ok this might be a post with a considerable amount of bias, but a great new book entitled “Practical PHP and MySQL” has been published by a talented author and friend.
The book guides the reader through eight web applications, looking at the issues surrounding each type of project. A useful resource for new and seasoned PHP developers if you are thinking about that new PHP book, then have a goosey-ganders at this one. Flicking through the book you’ll find references to close friends and the language style and presentation is quite relaxed and entertaining.
The book reminded me of how majorly into PHP we were at university. Jono had set up a PHP server at university so that we could write our final year projects in the language, at the time I was developing on and maintaining my own PHP server at our student house as was Jono. You’d often hear both myself and Jono SSHing into our Linux boxes, hosted on our 56k dial up connections back home, from within the uni lectures, compiling new features into our PHP installations, editing apache config files with really flaky versions of vi, and generally playing around with our code, when we should have been listening to something about Director or Lingo or something like that.
The whole LAMP ethos shows that the open source projects which fuel the system are viable technologies and have stood up well in the server market place. With the likes of ruby on rails and even PEAR and Smarty, PHP has become a major part of the web development environment, it still is remarkable how prevalent ASP is when you consider how less restrictive using a LAMP system is, puts cold fusion to shame anyway!
