back from the php|cruise - Books and APC

Finally recovering from my long flight back from the php|cruise, I hope everyone enjoyed my talks there. Unlike the php conference in germany, i (and the other real developers) got to meet alot more of the attendees, which was really nice.

I even managed to win George's Advanced PHP book in a raffle, A very nice book, as everyone has been saying. I really liked the section on how to write PHP extensions (the amount of times that would have come in handy, rather than greping PECL and ext/*). My only nitpick was that he did a whole chapter on DataAccess Modeling, where he basically implemented a really simplistic DataObject, and failed to mention DB_DataObjects.

I had a really good evening after the cruise with James Cox and Stuart Herbert, who like all people involved in PHP seem to have wonderfully forcefull opinions about a variety of subjects, which rarely match.. :). James, now an editor at Apress, also took us round a few bookshops in Orlando. And I finally got to see the only Book which has my name in the intro section.

Yes, I was one of the technical reviewers on PHP MySQL Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution and also wrote the last chapter (that you can download from that site). The book has proved to be pretty popular, which is quite nice.

On a slightly related note, I tried out georges APC extension on my little framework, on average I had page load times of 0.29s, was wasnt to bad, considering its a good ole php4 object MVC system, (although designed to be sensibly light weight). so I was very happy to see 0.06 seconds after installing APC. - nice work there.