SitePoint’s latest PHP book is aimed at taking your skills to the next level. Looking through the contents there was several tools and techniques I was already using but also lots of others that I would like to start using.

Each of the sections provides a general good introduction with some examples and links to similar tools or further reading. The book finishes by recommending that you implement the techniques / tools over a period of time, e.g. begin using version control then in a few months use a coding standard. I thought this was a particularly good point as I can see it would be very easy to get enthusiastic and try and implement version control, coding standards, documentation, profiling etc straight away.

My only slight annoyance with the book is that it is very heavily *nix orientated where as my current role involves a Windows network and as such I mainly work on Windows. But this is a very small detail and I’m well aware that I’m actually in the minority and the extra effort involved in creating Windows examples would be ridiculously time consuming and make the book unecessaraly long, and bump the price up.

This is another book I’d highly recommend and I’m sure there are a lot of developers who can benefit from a well structured book on writing cutting edge code.