I recently finished a book on the PEAR installer written by Greg Beaver. The book itself is an excellent read for anyone who develops installable PHP libraries or applications, and one I would highly recommend for anyone interested in building small to large PHP web applications.
Throughout the book, Greg demonstrates the complex features of the PEAR installer and package description file (package.xml) to guide you through understanding methods of distributing, installing, and maintaining PHP (and other) projects. The book is filled with real world examples and working applications from the guy who (seriously) ‘wrote the book’ on the PEAR installer.
To anyone who is building distributed PHP applications or reusable libraries, this book is a must have for understanding release deployment strategies and how they are managed with powerful ease. The author knows his stuff, and has used every one of the examples within real word applications. The book has everything from “Hello World” installable applications to a full blown source code repository and distribution system through PEAR channels.
With the book you will have all of the necessary information to build and maintain your complex PHP applications and easily distribute them across many servers, clients, or the open source community.
If you’re at the point in your application development where the unzip-and-go distribution method has reached its limit (typically the first bug after the first zip), the time has come to start building installable PEAR packages and to take advantage of all the capabilities the PEAR installer offers.
Despite maintaining my own PEAR channel server (pear.unl.edu) for over a year now, I still found plenty of information to continue the ease with which the PEAR installer offers. So even if you are an experienced PEAR developer, the book is still a good read and shelf reference.
I highly recommend the book, check it out.
