You want to do WHAT with PHP?

So, last year I wrote a book.  This year it's being released and is, in fact, almost out!  Very exciting!  It's called "You want to do WHAT with PHP?"  You will not find another book on the market like it.  Mostly because other PHP authors are not as crazy as I am.  Have you ever wondered if you could access a raw Linux ext2 file system in PHP?  You will have the answer.  Do you want to know how to scale your website that depends on long running requests?  You'll get that answer.  Have you wondered why UTF-8 is so freaking annoying?  You will understand it.  If you wanted to read the funniest acknowledgments ever written for a technical book?  You get it with this book.

In short, if you want a book that goes beyond the practical for the purpose of expanding your mind, this is the book for you.  It is not meant to be a "cookbook", pre se.  It is meant to, as Einstein put it, stretch your mind so that it does not return to its original shape.  Should you use these examples in a production environment?  Probably not.  However, the things you will learn here are based on concepts that could have been applied to several situations that I've seen over the course of being a PHP consultant at Zend for several years.  The examples are not intended to be practical.  They are used to explain gaps in knowledge or understanding that I have seen in PHP developer circles.  This is not a book that is intended for people wanting to cut and paste code.  It is intended for people who want to look at examples and apply the concepts to their situation.

Table of Contents

Sample Chapter

Book Description:
PHP is the hottest thing in Web development today, with over 30 million Web sites currently using the technology. Programmers are scrambling to get as much information as they can to stretch their use of PHP to the limits, and this book will help you do just that. In it you will find practical, but atypical, examples of PHP coding.

Author Kevin Schroeder is co-author of The IBM i Programmer's Guide to PHP and a Technology Evangelist for Zend Technologies—The PHP Company—with an in-depth knowledge of the language and an innovative approach to development. He shows PHP solutions and examples you won’t find in other books: binary protocols, character encoding, asynchronous operations, structured file access, daemons, and much more.

There are quite literally hundreds of books of the “build a Web site in PHP” genre, but this is not your typical how-to “PHP 101” book. No, this book is for the creative and the curious. It is a “what’s possible” book. Creative PHP types who have already purchased a book on PHP and want to go beyond the basics into what is possible, not just practical, will find it especially useful. Curious PHP types who have written a fair amount of PHP code but are now ready to go deeper, into the lower-level aspects of PHP, will also be inspired by what this book has to offer.

You Want to Do What with PHP? is like a PHP cookbook. It contains not just theories, but also considerations and varying options on top of simply providing code. With it, you will discover new approaches to problem-solving using PHP, expand your development skill set, and gain valuable assistance toward building ever more advanced PHP applications.

With You Want to Do WHAT with PHP? you will:

    * Become a better PHP programmer
    * Discover unusual, but practical, solutions to problems you will likely face on a weekly, if not daily, basis
    * Learn lower-level programming that is not typical for Web-based applications
    * Discern why operating system level options matter when devising solutions

Contents:
   Chapter 1: Networking and Sockets
   Chapter 2: Binary Protocols
   Chapter 3: Character Encoding
   Chapter 4: Streams
   Chapter 5: SPL
   Chapter 6: Asynchronous Operations with Some Encryption Thrown In
   Chapter 7: Structured File Access
   Chapter 8: Daemons
   Chapter 9: Debugging, Profiling, and Good Development
   Chapter 10: Preparing for Success