Upgrading to PHP 5

Other Resources

These web sites and books are excellent companions to Upgrading to PHP 5.

Web Sites

There is a tremendous amount of PHP reference material online. With everything from the annotated PHP manual to sites with periodic articles and tutorials, a fast Internet connection rivals a large bookshelf in PHP documentary usefulness.

The Annotated PHP Manual (http://www.php.net/manual/)

The official PHP Manual contains thousands of pages covering all aspects of PHP. It’s an invaluable resource for looking up functions.

PHP mailing lists (http://www.php.net/mailing-lists.php)

Discuss PHP on the PHP mailing lists. Don’t be shy, there’s a list for every topic: programming, databases, and even Windows. A mailing list archive lives at http://news.php.net/.

PHP Presentation archive (http://talks.php.net/)

A great way to keep up-to-date on all the latest PHP developments, this archive contains conference presentation slides.

PEAR (http://pear.php.net/)

Don’t reimplement the wheel, download it from PEAR. PEAR—the PHP Extension and Application Repository—contains PHP classes that simplify forms processing, provide a database abstraction layer, generate class documentation, and solve hundreds of other tasks.

PECL (http://pecl.php.net/)

PECL is PEAR’s sister. PECL—the PHP Extension Community Library—is a collection of PHP extensions written in C. They’re just like the bundled PHP extensions, except they’re targeted at a specialized audience. PECL contains may useful extensions, including a PHP cache and optimizer, extensions to let you talk to Perl and Python from PHP, and an XML pull parser.

PHP DevCenter (http://www.onlamp.com/php/)

A large collection of PHP articles and tutorials freely available on the web.

PHPCommunity.org (http://www.phpcommunity.org/)

A gathering place where members of the PHP community can hang out and meet other PHP programmers.

Books

These books are all helpful problem-solving guides and references. Most of the books in the list are web-specific, and the top six books are my favorite PHP and MySQL texts.

1. PHP Cookbook ,^[1] by David Sklar and Adam Trachtenberg (O’Reilly, 2003).

2. Essential PHP Tools: Modules, Extensions, and Accelerators , by David Sklar (Apress, 2004).

3. Advanced PHP Programming , by George Schlossnagle (SAMS, 2004).

4. MySQL Reference Manual , by Michael “Monty” Widenius, David Axmark, and MySQL AB (O’Reilly, 2002); also available at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/.

5. MySQL Cookbook , by Paul DuBois (O’Reilly, 2003).

6. High Performance MySQL , by Jeremy D. Zawodny and Derek J. Balling (O’Reilly, 2004).

7. XML in a Nutshell , Second Edition, by Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means (O’Reilly, 2002).

8. HTTP Developer’s Handbook , by Chris Shiflett (SAMS, 2003).

9. Web Security, Privacy & Commerce , Second Edition, by Simson Garfinkel and Gene Spafford (O’Reilly, 2001).

10. Mastering Regular Expressions , Second Edition, by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl (O’Reilly, 2002).

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^[1] While I admit to some bias in favor of PHP Cookbook, I frequently find myself looking up recipes when I need to refresh my memory on a particular topic or technique.