PEAR is the standard library of PHP code for PHP4. Tutorials and documentation on PEAR can be found here.

This article presents a compilation of all available PHP debuggers and caches, with benchmarks.

A comparison of PHP of Cold Fusion by Mike Sheldon. It's interesting to note that Allaire is moving strongly toward the Java platform, and reports are that CF 5.0 will be an abstraction layer on a Java Servlet engine. Allaire is also very definitely focusing on the Enterprise market, and IMHO is not paying much attention to the "Pro" market anymore. While the profit margins are definitely better in the Enterprise market, there's a whole ton more volume in the rest of the market, which is ripe for PHP to dominate.

The main issues discussed in this article about PHP versus Perl are (1) Perl does not separate code from HTML (2) mod_perl is a fine hack, but still a hack (3) and performance.

PHP is now the most popular module for the Apache server, currently running on about two million Web sites. This article discusses a short history, what to look for in a scripting engine, advantages and disadvantages of PHP, and more.

According to Symantec AntiVirus Research Center, "PHP.Pirus is the first virus written in PHP, a server-side scripting language used for dynamic Web page generation. The virus searches for .php and .htm files and inserts code to call itself. The virus executes only on servers with PHP interpreters. This virus cannot be contracted by simply visiting an infected Web page." The Web page offers technical description and how to remove the virus.

A survey and discussion of how popular PHP, JSP, ASP, and CFM scripting languages are by counting search engine URLs.

PHP's lack of a standard database API makes switching databases difficult and costly once an application has been written. For example, if you write a program that uses a MySQL database on the back end, and you want to modify that program so that it uses a Sybase database, you'll most likely spend hours modifying the code. This article, along with sample codes, discusses possible solutions.

This article takes a brief look at PHP4/Zend technology. It discusses such issues as architecture and functionality, PHP3 vs PHP4, pros and cons of PHP, etc.

Being a good PHP hacker isn't just about writing single line solutions to complex problems. For example, web gurus know that speed of coding is much more important than speed of code. This article looks at techniques that can help you become a better PHP hacker. It assumes that you have a basic knowledge of PHP and databases.