I know it’s not exactly cutting edge news anymore, but just in case you hadn’t heard, go to php.net to check out the latest incarnation of this wonderful language.

And now for the standard "installing PHP from scratch" tuturial, no website would be complete without it. In fact, when I did this last week I had to search around for ages for the various information, so here follows a step-by-step list that aims to save you the hassle. Lines starting with a # denote comments, everything else must be typed as it appears.

Before we continue, note the following: for the install to work properly you need to *do everything as root*. And in the order outlined below . Also, it is good practice to put all your downloaded files in a standard place, people generally use /usr/local/src/

We all know that laziness, and not necessity, is the mother of invention. Can you craft shorter code than that listed below? Not only are you defending your code against other coders, but defending your scripting language of choice against the others. Coders, get coding.

Every been curious about what’s going on with your PHP code once it’s carefully debugged and up and running ? The following article on Happy Hacker explains in tasty detail code organisation at the C level, how it’s compiled down to assembly language, Process Memory Organization and stack usage. On the same site you’ll also find some interesting articles on the basics of C programming.

Check out the full article at the Register.

I’ve had no end of fun this weekend installing and uninstalling and reinstalling and reuninstalling Windows-XP Home Edition and Red Hat 7.2 Personal Edition, both of which launched last week.

Check out this great article that does a good job of explaining the use of indexes to optimize queries. Also a good explanation of EXPLAIN, OPTIMIZE, ANALYZE and TRUNCATE.

The DBG Php Debugger is a comprehensive software tool that helps you debugging your php scripts. It may work with your production or development WEB server remotely or locally. This version features, amongst other details, a client part for both Linux and Windows and a profiler so now you can find bottlenecks of your script easily.

Click here for the DBG site.

A discussion of how to secure PHP code with some advice on programming guidelines, user-input filtering, and configuration settings.

• Secure Programming Guidelines
• Using PHP Safe Mode
• Include Files
• Filtering User Input
• Configuration Settings
• Trusting Environment Variables
• Calling External Programs
• Database Interactions

Click here for the full story.