Phoenix.pm: Best PHP reference book?

[Victor Odhner]

Scott, thanks for the book suggestions.

Scott Walters wrote:
> Not to start a flame-war, but if you know and understand
> Perl, why would you want to "learn" PHP? Just another resume
> buzzword, you have to use it, what? Perl is already slighted
> enough for not being a serious programming language, only
> suited for rank hacks with no engineering discipline and
> script kiddies (also with no engineering discipline).

I'm afraid I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
Is it that you don't like PHP?  Or you don't like Perl?

After 30+ years at journeyman level in ALGOL, PL/I, COBOL, C
and a bunch of less useful languages that I'd just as soon
not think about (Prolog, LISP, VB, need I go on?), I found Perl.
I've basically worked in nothing else except some C and a
couple lines of VB in the past 6 years or so.  Of course
nowadays I'm doing data entry as my day job, but I'm earning
more with Perl most weeks.

Perl works.  PHP is just, well, a piece of the Perl/Apache
thing as far as I'm concerned.  I'm working now in a system
that has some growing CGI response problems -- the pains of
growing success -- and working in-process (PHP, ModPerl) may
be part of the solution.  Not the whole solution, mind you --
excessive database hits may be the real problem, but first
they have to break up the 6,000 line monolithic library that
gets loaded by each CGI call.  Um yeah, do you think?  ;-)

So now about those books:  was one of them a really good
reference, would you say?  Which one did you like *best*?

Vic