The topics of recommended books & websites comes up very often, so rather than bringing it up every other class posting once seems to make more sense. Just to be clear, these aren't things you need to buy for the course, just things that I have found useful myself while programming.
Disclaimer #1 - I write for Wrox, an imprint of Wiley, I get many of their books for free. Actually, I got all the books recommended below for free but that's just a coincidence.
Full Disclosure - For the book links at Amazon I've used my associate ID. This didn't effect which books I chose at all, I'm just mentioning it in the interests of full disclosure.
Recommended Websites:
- PHP - http://www.php.net PHP's home. Remember to search for a function just go to php.net/<function name> it will find it automagically
- PHP Security - http://phpsec.org/ The PHP Security Consortium, The PHP Security Guide is a great read
- Cheat Sheets - http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets/ Great little sheets you can print out for fast look ups of function names and such
- Regular Expressions - http://regular-expressions.info/ I read this site everytime I come back to regex
- Google - http://www.google.com
- Yahoo! Theatre
Other Information Sources
- PHP General Mailing List - http://www.php.net/mailing-lists.php I'd recomend signing up with a GMail account, the list is very helpfull but also very high traffic
- #PHP Chat Channel - http://freenode.net/ There is no 'Official' chat channel for PHP, however I find the one on the Freenode IRC network very helpfull.
- Conferences - I have had the opportunity to attend a few PHP conferences and have found them all VERY informative. I would say that the information density in a conference talk is as high or higher than what we're dealing with in the class. Bring your thinking caps.
Books
- Beginning PHP 5 - I learned PHP from this books predecessor. I'm not as happy with the index on this one as I was with the original. But overall I really like learning from Wrox books.
- HTTP Developer's Handbook - If you're planning on doing a lot with PHP having a good understanding of how HTTP works will be a great asset.
- Apache Security - If you end up running your own webserver this book will help you keep Apache running smoothly and securly.
- PHP Cookbook - This book contains a lot of short examples on how to do a variety of different things with PHP. It's a good book to have around to look up solutions to common problems.
- Professional Web APIs with PHP - This book goes explains how to interact with many different popular APIs
- Essential PHP Security - A short but great read on PHP security.
- MySQL Phrasebook - A great pocketbook sized reference with lots of great little "phrases" to help you out while working with MySQL. You can read a more detailed review on my blog.
- Advanced PHP Programming - A great book on advanced PHP programming, techniques, methodologies, coding styles, etc. You can read a more detailed and very positive review on my blog.
- Practical Cryptography
- Great book demonstrating the proper implementation of a single encryption system
- Secrets and Lies
Development Tools
- UltraEdit - Great text editor with lots of power built in. I spend the first three years of my PHP development days using UltraEdit exclusively. I still come back to it for quick jobs, JavaScript or HTML coding. It's also a great choice for your regular flat file & xml editing needs. If you're just starting out with PHP and you're not sure how much development you're going to be doing, I would spend the $40 on this, and hold off on the Studio purchase for a while
- Zend Studio - Powerfull development environment with code completion, full debugging tools, and a code analyzer that has helped me catch many a bug.
- Komodo - Powerfull development environment for dynamic languages (PHP, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, etc.). Not quite as polished as Zend Studio (yet?) but contains many powerful tools (Rx Toolkit, HTTP Inspector, etc.)
- Regex Coach - Great tool for exploring and testing regular expressions
Please reply to this list with your own recomendations. I've loaned out a lot of my PHP books at present, once I get them back I will go over them to see if I've missed anything.