I read Advanced PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle.

While not a bad book, it left me with mixed feelings. It covers too many things, from coding style, design patterns and templates to caching, profiling and the Zen engine internals. I was expecting depth (since it’s supposed to be advanced) but the book just touches on too many concepts. A better title would be “Introduction to Advanced PHP Concepts”.

Anyway, every book has interesting things. My favorite parts were about profiling and benchmarking. I also enjoyed the Zend engine section, because I had never read about it.