PHP De Luxe - PHP5 Edition is being printed these days and will be available in early September already. It's written in German and fills the gap between all those books for beginners (being mostly duplications of the online manual) and those for experts mainly focussing on architectural issues and pretty patterns, in the market of current German PHP books. It's a book for people actually working with that PHP stuff, not for beginners and not for those interested in beautiful theories in the first instance, as the 992 pages were written by people which do actually use those things each and every day: Chregu "domxml" Stocker, Richard "moh" Samar, Andre Gildemeister, Matthias Lehn and myself.
Topics include quite everything the practitioner needs to know, from a careful and example-laden introduction to the new object-oriented features to migration issues, an exclusive in-depth coverage of the all-new XML features to stream wrappers and filters, CLI tricks, effective caching stunts or the new reflection API, and quite some treasures out of PEAR and PECL.
The book concludes with some hands-on real projects such as that Popoon/SlideML/BXE thingy mentioned before.
In retrospect, the most tricky thing was writing really good code examples: they have to be short, as self-contained as possible and certainly exactly demonstrate the issue as clear and undisguised as possible. And then the example should still make sense and be of practical nature. Finding those reasonable examples -and many programmers read only those anyway- often took quite some time, after that it was only a matter of writing the prose in a style both clear and compact, professional and likeable, which I really hope did work out.
You can currently order your copy directly at MITP (no, not that MITP..), via Amazon or any other bookstore. The table of contents and an FAQ section will be published on the accompanying website which is to be updated very soon.
I wonder how it will feel to read my name on the cover of a ~1000 page volume.,