I am delighted to announce that I have new video titles available! I’m delighted for two reasons: selfishly, because these things take a lot of prep and I am pleased they are done; but also because I think it is very good news that a key industry player such as O’Reilly recognises PHP’s place in the world and works hard to publish new content in this area.

There are two videos available: PHP Web Services and Intermediate PHP (subtitle: a bunch of things Lorna thinks will make developers’ lives and applications better!), you can click through (disclaimer: affiliate links!) to get more information and a detailed chapter outline for each course. I hope that either or both of them will be useful to you.

Intermediate PHP

This video is a bit of a combination of ideas; really it’s aimed at PHP developers who have been leading sheltered lives for a few years, or who are just now moving beyond the beginner stage (we all start sometime, is my firm belief). The course includes useful demonstration of modern tools such as Composer, and also old ones that often get overlooked such as the commandline, security features, and PDO – all of which I’ve included with some real-world-ish examples.

New features in the last few versions of PHP have been very object-oriented. If you’ve never studied OOP formally, or if you’re just moving up from function-based programming (hello, lovely Drupal devs!), then I think it’s really important to get a good grounding. This course therefore includes a light intro to PHP so that you know where you are, before moving on to showing off the shiny new things that have been added more recently. For developers looking to brush up in any of these areas, I’ve tried to create real, practical examples and the code is all on github too.

PHP Web Services

This isn’t quite the video of the book, because PHP Web Services is a textbook and the video is more of a “hey, look what we can make!”. Also since the book has been out more than a year, there are a few things that have changed and the video is bang up to date with the newer tools. Again, lots of example code and it’s all on github so you can pause the video to make me stop talking and have a prod around at it all yourself :) I’m of the opinion that APIs need not be rocket science; they are within reach of every developer once you know what to do and how to do it! This course does just that, I’ve tried to let you “look over my shoulder” as I build basic versions of the APIs and integration code I work with on a regular basis.

Whether you are a books person or a videos person depends mostly on your learning style. I love to teach in-person, and videos give an opportunity to *show* you rather than *tell* you how I would do a particular thing. Hopefully one or other of these videos are useful to you, please let me know how you get on!

(O’Reilly do run occasional promotions on their content and they notify me when it includes my stuff – I’ll be retweeting from @lornajane if that happens!)