Reference

Being as popular as it is, PHP gets a lot of coverage on the Internet. The best place to look for information, though, is the PHP online manual, at http://www.php.net. It is comprehensive, well written, and updated regularly:

• http://www.phpbuilder.net A large PHP scripts and tutorials site where you can learn new techniques and also chat with other PHP developers.

• http://www.zend.com The home page of a company founded by two of the key developers of PHP. Zend develops and sells proprietary software, including a powerful IDE and a code cache, to aid PHP developers.

• http://pear.php.net/ The home of the PEAR project contains a large collection of software you can download and try, and it has thorough documentation for it all.

• http://www.phparch.com/ There are quite a few good PHP magazines around, but PHP Architect probably leads the way. It posts some of its articles online for free, and its forums are good, too.

Quality books on PHP abound, and you are certainly spoiled for choice. For beginning developers, the best available is PHP and MySQL Web Development (Sams Publishing), ISBN 0-672-32672-8. For a concise, to-the-point book covering all aspects of PHP, check out PHP in a Nutshell (O'Reilly). Finally, for advanced developers, you can consult Advanced PHP Programming (Sams Publishing), ISBN 0-672-32561-6.