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I see Wrox is turning up the heat on the PHP book market, and while I understand there are many costs involved in publishing, these larger books are, in many cases, not cost effective.

Wrox has a PHP string handling book coming out, as well as a few others, in the 250-300 page target range. However, I have a feeling these will still be $40+. I'm not sure if Wrox is heading towards ebooks or not, but topics like these deserve to be $15 ebooks, not $45 hardcovers.

PHP has numerous books covering different topics, a professional support organization and training courses. (subtle plugs!) What's next on the horizon?

I see the publisher of phparch.com (good magazine!) has an early PHP->C converter which speeds up code dramatically. Umbrello is a UML modeller for KDE which generates PHP code. I saw refernces to a PHP/Tk/DHTML project, but forgotthe link. Any other cool PHP things people know about?

One - the book is OK, but out of date if only because of the 'register globals' stuff - they shouldn't have assumed it was on in a 'professional' book in the first place, imo.

Second - shameless plug - we offer PHP training classes. here

Third - PHP topics always devolve into 'java/perl/.net/asp/cf is better than PHP'. Anyone who is interested in putting together serious multi-platform tests between PHP and other languages, please contact me privately, as I'd like to arrange something with other developers. Not as 'one language beats all' but to present some tests which aren't sponsored by the companies (MS, Sun, whoever) which obviously have a BIG bias as to how they want the results to appear. Having a cross section of multiple developers from multiple platforms agreeing to common test terms would help eliminate that, I think.

1) This one is really annoying. Certain pre-defined variables (I'm not sure which, maybe only user-inputted data) are pre-slashed. So if a user inputs the string 'My name is "Jon"', you get it as 'My name is \"Jon\"'. WTF is up with that? That's not what he said! I can't find the reason for this or anything else about it in the documentation (maybe it's there somewhere, but I can't find it).

It's also pretty annoying when you don't read the manual - and this one is NOT obscure to find. Section 8 - "Variables" (which is what you're dealing with) has a section about 'Variables from outside PHP':
http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.varia bles.ex ternal.php

2) Every time a page is loaded, it has to be re-parsed, as well as any included scripts that it uses. This is very inefficient.
Then design a better language yourself that has nifty things like variable variables (echo $$b[0]->foo;) and is still faster than most other languages. Or just get a host that will use one of the many caching products available (zend, ioncube, etc)

3) It's a real pain to include scripts that are in different directories which include other scripts, because they will try to open them relative to the location of the original page.

Seems pretty damn logical to me. Of course, PHP will also look for files in the 'include_path' which is set in the php.ini file, so it's really looking in multiple places. And it wouldn't kill you to just use a predefined constant like DOCUMENT_ROOT and include files relative to that so your scripts would be portable and a bit easier to move around internally if you need to.

PHP does have problems - nothing you've mentioned here is a 'problem' beyond the level of mere annoyance to a handful of people.

Slight plug - those who've taken our PHP training course have never complained about the issues you brought up as 'problems'.

Cheers

After meeting with him for 4 hours I got to know him pretty well and he is a very informed consumer. He was mentioning windows and ASP because that is what they have used in the past for the web sites they build. It just turns out that NO ONE ELSE had ever approached him about using open source technologies. He knew about them, but none of the vendors they were using offered open source technologies.

I think this really drives home the point that Eric Raymond makes in his speaking about going to the "top" to get the company to use open source. If you get the decision makers on your side then things will start to move.

If more companies like ours embraced open source to build its products with and support the product on open source platforms it covers two of the biggest objections, cost and support. Our cost is lowered since we are using open source products to build it with, therefore there are no license fees to pay. And two, we support it very well on linux. If the product works and works well, will save your business money after you buy it and is supported there isn't much of an argument against using it. If the partner your company is working with doesn't use open source then you are going to wind up using windows and paying a lot for it.

I will say this, the open source community needs a few things to kick this thing in the rear:

1. Business tools - like ACT, goldmine, contact management, accounting packages, inventory management tools etc. The problem is that "geeks" don't won't to write stuff like this so we leave the job to closed source software companies to develop these apps and make millions. Sure we almost have evolution but how long did it take the open source community to say, you know this Outlook thing is pretty cool and companies are using it.

2. Kill off the stupid forking of open source projects. What I mean by this is if you go to sourceforge.net there are over 29,000 projects. Most of which are things that people are duplicating over and over and over and over. The programmers that are cauusing this say how bad a project is and then go off and start some lame project that never goes anywhere. These programmers aren't doing the open source community any good. They should FIRST AND FORMOST join an existing project and make it better. This would make the SuSE distribution a lot smaller (hahaha).

3. Geeks need to become salesmen and start speaking in terms a business or another person can understand. Telling your boss that you are "31337" and he should use linux because your uptime is 126 days is not convincing enough. I have found that business owners respond positively if given the proper pitch.

Holy cow - let's be disingenous, shall we?

First off Windows lets you select various "appearances" - comparing a stock Win 9x screen with a customized Linux desktop is not apples to apples.

RegEdit really isn't meant for most end users.

Windows still has consistancy over any Linux desktop - Alt-F does pretty much the same in every app. That's not the case in KDE, or Gnome, or anything else. Nearly every program I run under Linux has a different file browsing mechanism for opening files in an app. GIMP is different than KWord, for example.

Compare Windows95 with standard X - http://www.tapinternet.com/X.png. Now what looks better?

BTW, that non-repeating background looks just as stupid as the non-repeating "clouds" background in Win95 at resolutions higher than 640x480.

But I suppose once you're used to Linux, you take such basic functionality for granted.

I'll tell you what other basic functionality I take for granted - being able to copy something to a clipboard and paste it into other apps. ANY other app. OR - being able to highlight text and replace it with the clipboard contents. That seems to be an unheard of concept for many Linux users I talk to (one of them works here).