Learning PHP – best PHP books

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Learning PHP – best PHP books

PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th Edition) (Developer’s Library) (Hardcover)
by, Luke Welling and Laura Thomson

This book is one of the best books on PHP and MySQL. It starts with introductions to PHP and MySQL and then shows you how to write common applications from scratch using these technologies. You will learn how to write a shopping cart, a content management system (CMS), a web based email service, a mailing list manager, a forum application, and more.
Some other useful topics covered in this book are:
How to run an E-Commerce site, Session management, user login and registration, generating images and PDF documents on the fly with PHP, using network protocols with PHP, Object Oriented Programming (OOP), regular expressions, etc.
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Advanced PHP Programming
by, George Schlossnagle

This book will teach you advanced techniques required to make a large scale web application (web site), there are many advanced topics covered in this book such as:
Various caching techniques using PHP, unit testing, good API design, interacting with remote services, Object Oriented Programming (OOP) through design patterns, Session handling, and more.
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PHP|Architect’s Guide to PHP Design Patterns
by, Jason E. Sweat

This book covers many of the Design Patterns that are common in developing websites and is one of the first PHP Design Patterns books. Code samples are in PHP4 and PHP5.
The book covers 16 different design patterns including:
The ValueObject Pattern, The Factory Pattern, The Singleton Pattern, The Registry Pattern, The MockObject Pattern, The Strategy Pattern, The Model-View-Controller Pattern, and many more.
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PHP|Architect’s Guide to PHP Security
by, Ilia Alshanetsky

This book will teach you how to make secure and reliable web applications, the author is one of the contributors to PHP programming language core.
Topics covered are: Input validation, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks prevention, Command Injection attacks prevention, SQL Injection attacks prevention, Code injection attacks prevention, and more.
This is a MUST read book for PHP developers.
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Mastering Regular Expressions (3rd Edition)
by, Jeffrey E F Friedl

This book is the best book on Regular Expressions. If you’re having trouble learning Regular Expressions,this book will help you grasp the concept and master them.
Plus, the 3rd edition has an entire chapter dedicated to PHP.