Talk In Code

Planet PHP is a feed aggregator blog specifically for PHP related blogs. There are a good number of blogs that the site uses to update with so there is always plenty of stuff going up on the site. The site is not run by PHP, and is an independent project run by Christian Stocker and Tobias Schlitt.

The good thing about this site is that it saves having to go through all of the blogs in turn to see what is interesting in the world of PHP. If you run a PHP blog you can submit your site to the list and get your articles included in the updates.

Practical PHP Programming is a wiki site that has been set up to provide a central area for PHP developers to contribute to learning and understanding PHP. This site was recently called Hudzilla and was a pretty good online PHP book.

Practical PHP Programming was a pretty good site when it was just static pages, people were always linking to it from the php.net site in order to explain something that wasn’t clear in the documentation. I think that the decision to turn it into a Wiki can only lead to it becoming a better resource.

I have been doing a lot of benchmarking lately with regards to what is the most efficient way to program PHP. PHP Benchmark is a site that is dedicated to that single task.

This site is in the early stages but looks very promising and deals with some of the major assumptions that programmers have about PHP, including the single and double quotes issue. I would say that most of the tests are only run a few times (around 1000) and so this doesn’t give a full representative picture, but I look forward to seeing more from this site in the future.

Here are some links to my own benchmarking tests on Talk In Code.

• Single Quotes Or Double Quotes With PHP?
• Quickest Way To Download A Web Page With PHP

By far the best resource for finding information about PHP and all of the functions available is from the PHP website. Not only can you view the PHP documentation, but you can also download PHP and many of the extensions like the Smarty template system.

Each PHP function and section has its own page with lots of detailed information about usage and instillation, which can be found quite easily on the site by entering the domain name followed by the function name you want to look up. If the function isn’t found that the site points you towards a search results page.

One of the better aspects of the site is the user submitted code snippets that can be found on many of the pages. Take the substr() function as an example. There are many pages of user submitted functions, hints, tips, error trapping and other code snippets which can usually solve most of the problems that you are stuck on.

Although the instillation section is completely brilliant, the site probably isn’t the best site in the world if you are starting out to learn PHP, there is a getting started section, but this wont get you past a certain level.