I hate getting books for review that are written by friends of mine. I have a strict policy that I won't review a book I don't like. This leads to awkward conversations if, after skimming the book, I decide not to review it. Thankfully, that isn't the case with this book. Today I want to talk about " You Want to Do What with PHP? " written by my friend and former co-worker, Kevin Schrorder . (I used to work at Zend, Kevin still does.) "You Want to Do What with PHP?" isn't your usual PHP book. I am guessing that even advanced PHP developers don't have a book like this on their shelves as I've never read one that covers quite this variety of material. Kevin talks about a lot of topics that we politely call "Edge Cases" for PHP developers. (in impolite company, we use other terms that are sprinkled with profanity to express the mental instability of any programmer that would do some of these things with PHP) This book guides you through building things like your own stream handler, asynchronous operations and my personal favorite, writing Daemons in PHP. (Yes, all of these things are possible in PHP) These aren't tasks that most PHP think about or ever attempt; as Kevin points out in the introduction, PHP is most often used for building web applications. However, PHP is a powerful tool and if you dive below its web exterior, you find that you can do a