All I needed to learn in PHP I learned in Drupal

Last weekend I ventured to Bellingham Washington for a beautiful weekend at LinuxFest Northwest. All and all it was a great weekend. The weather cooperated and the meeting was wonderful.

Along the way I bought some tickets for the LinuxFest raffle. By chance one of those was a winning ticket and the prize included picking from some great titles. I'll write more about these great titles soon. First however, the title that wound up to be a disappointment. I picked up a copy of
Wicked Cool PHP: Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems
. From the title I was hoping to find some wicked cool stuff in it.

In fairness there is good content in the book. The problem is that as a Drupalist most of it isn't terribly useful. Sure, should I ever desire to use Smarty templates again it would be useful. (And yes Smarty templates could be used with Drupal but the PHPTemplate theme engine is much better supported). Moving from chapter to chapter it seems that the book will soon be a give-away as I just don't have much use for it. All the discussion of things like blocking cross-site scripting or managing sessions just aren't things that one has to spend a lot of time thinking about as long as you're following the Drupal coding standards.