I'm looking for a (few) good books to get started with LAMP development. I'm a long time Microsoft developer, including heavy ASP.NET, and I want to learn LAMP for a number of reasons.
What are some good books to get started, for someone coming from ASP.NET? Any books targeting the more recent versions of PHP would be appreciated.
[NOTE: I wouldn't mind substituting Postgre for MySQL, but that isn't a requirement]
O'reilly books on PHP are very helpful. Having a good base of understanding in Linux will also be crucial. Setting up and using your own LAMP stack will give you more insight than any book. I recommend Ubuntu as a great Linux distro.
Yeah, whatever you do don't develop on Windows and deploy to Linux. If you must, just deploy regularly, so you aren't surprised by anything.
A long time ago before I knew anything about good software development practices, I wrote an entire PHP application on my local machine. I deployed to a Linux server and realized (the hard way) that case-sensitivity matters, both in the file system and in MySQL. I ended up spending a week hunting down all my queries that had differing case than the database had.
I recommend Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional, Third Edition published by Apress; It'll get you started on the newest stable iterations of mySQL and PHP. For Linux/Apache, your best bet is the online documentation and searching Google as you come across problems.
Book stack lamp http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/ls_lamps/article/0,,DIY_14086_2268395,00.html
I honestly think that there are plenty of PHP resources out there online.
There is also plenty of PHP source code to peruse. Looking at how CodeIgniter sets up a project should give you some insights on ways to setup PHP projects.
One thing that helped me learn the server administrative side of things was setting up my own web site at a VPS. http://articles.slicehost.com/ has lots of articles on how to setup Linux servers.
The online php manual is one of the best places to look for help.
Best place for newbie examples and clearing concepts.
But don't always take the user submitted comments / sample code seriously, because old comments tend to remain and often fixes in PHP itself make those old suggestions redundant.