Good intermediate/advanced PHP programming resources/books?

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What is the best PHP programming book?

I come from a ASP.NET background (and over a decade development experience and a CS degree) where there is plenty of good quality resources on the web (e.g. MSDN, MSDN Patterns and Practices, reference software such as Enterprise Library, Petshop, Haacked and Gu blogs) and in books (e.g. Effective C#, Professional ASP.NET MVC, C# in Depth). Having dabbled in PHP for mostly pleasure on and off for years I recently decided to bolster my PHP knowledge to a more advanced level and to be honest I am a bit put off by the lack of information on the web and books geared towards the professional experienced web developer for PHP; its hard wading through the masses of beginners and/or poor quality material out there. Even here on SO, a search reveals only a couple of non beginner books, compared to over a dozen asp.net specific ones.

I'm starting to feel like this could be a waste of effort (and spend some time with another language), hoping to see some PHP book shaped rabbits pulled out of the Hat.

My short-list so far has the books "PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice" and "PHP in Action".

Answer 1

www.php.net

Answer 2

Personally, I've found that once you get past the basics, there are no good language specific intermediate/advanced books. That doesn't mean that there aren't good books out there, but more that there is less need for language specific text once you are reasonably skilled at the language itself (IMHO).

So, instead of trying to find a book on advanced PHP, I would suggest finding a book on programming in general. Almost all concepts that you can pick should be easily applied to PHP.

Use the advanced language specific resources to then bring these abstract concepts to PHP itself. There's no point in reading about programming an Observer Pattern in PHP if you don't truly understand what the pattern is first. And I'll bet that if you understand the concepts in more general books, you'll find that you won't need the "advanced php books"...

Here's a few resources right here on SO:

1. What is the single most influential book every programmer should read?
2. List of freely available programming books

Answer 3

Not a book, but if you want to look at best practices in action, you can look at the code of some good projects written in PHP. I personally find drupal's core code to be very well written. I have learned a lot from it.