As PHP grew, it began to be recognized as a world-wide popular
development platform. One of the most interesting ways of
seeing this trend was by observing the books about PHP that
came out throughout the years.
To the best of our knowledge, the first book dedicated to PHP was
'PHP - tvorba interaktivních internetových aplikací' - a Czech
book published in April 1999, authored by Jirka Kosek. Next month
followed a German book authored by Egon Schmid, Christian Cartus
and Richard Blume. The first book in English about PHP was
published shortly afterwards, and was 'Core PHP Programming' by
Leon Atkinson. Both of these books covered PHP 3.0.
While these books were the first of their kind - they were
followed by a large number of books from a host of authors and
publishers. There are over 40 books in English, 50 books in
German, and over 20 books in French! In addition, you can find
books about PHP in many other languages, including Spanish,
Korean, Japanese and Hebrew.
Clearly, this large number of books, written by different
authors, published by many publishers, and their availability
in so many languages - are a strong testimony for PHP's