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/)
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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)
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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/)
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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/)
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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/)
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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/)
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A large collection of PHP articles and tutorials freely available on the web.
- PHPCommunity.org (http://www.phpcommunity.org/)
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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.
PHP Cookbook,[1] by David Sklar and Adam Trachtenberg (O'Reilly, 2003).
Essential PHP Tools: Modules, Extensions, and Accelerators, by David Sklar (Apress, 2004).
Advanced PHP Programming, by George Schlossnagle (SAMS, 2004).
MySQL Reference Manual, by Michael "Monty" Widenius, David Axmark, and MySQL AB (O'Reilly, 2002); also available at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/.
MySQL Cookbook, by Paul DuBois (O'Reilly, 2003).
High Performance MySQL, by Jeremy D. Zawodny and Derek J. Balling (O'Reilly, 2004).
XML in a Nutshell, Second Edition, by Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means (O'Reilly, 2002).
HTTP Developer's Handbook, by Chris Shiflett (SAMS, 2003).
Web Security, Privacy & Commerce, Second Edition, by Simson Garfinkel and Gene Spafford (O'Reilly, 2001).
Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition, by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl (O'Reilly, 2002).
