Upgrading to PHP 5

Other Resources

These web sites and books are excellent companions to Upgrading to PHP 5.

Web Sites

There is a tremendous amount of PHP reference material online. With everything from the annotated PHP manual to sites with periodic articles and tutorials, a fast Internet connection rivals a large bookshelf in PHP documentary usefulness.

The Annotated PHP Manual (http://www.php.net/manual/)

The official PHP Manual contains thousands of pages covering all aspects of PHP. It’s an invaluable resource for looking up functions.

PHP mailing lists (http://www.php.net/mailing-lists.php)

Discuss PHP on the PHP mailing lists. Don’t be shy, there’s a list for every topic: programming, databases, and even Windows. A mailing list archive lives at http://news.php.net/.

PHP Presentation archive (http://talks.php.net/)

A great way to keep up-to-date on all the latest PHP developments, this archive contains conference presentation slides.

PEAR (http://pear.php.net/)

Don’t reimplement the wheel, download it from PEAR. PEAR—the PHP Extension and Application Repository—contains PHP classes that simplify forms processing, provide a database abstraction layer, generate class documentation, and solve hundreds of other tasks.

PECL (http://pecl.php.net/)

PECL is PEAR’s sister. PECL—the PHP Extension Community Library—is a collection of PHP extensions written in C. They’re just like the bundled PHP extensions, except they’re targeted at a specialized audience. PECL contains may useful extensions, including a PHP cache ...