Did you know OmniTI (employers of Shiflett and Welling, former employer of Thomson, and sister company to MessageSystems (Wez Furlong & George Schlossnagle) hav

Did you know OmniTI (employers of Shiflett and Welling, former employer of Thomson, and sister company to MessageSystems (Wez Furlong & George Schlossnagle) have an office in Brooklyn? I believe the main contributor to CakePHP works there too. If you're that interested in PHP, it might be something to consider being relatively close by. I'm bookish in how I approach programming too, and among your list have read "PHP & MySQL Web Development," Shiflett's "Essential PHP Security," and "Advanced PHP Programming" when I was first starting out (I started out as a PHP programmer). If you're anything like me, the books get less exciting as the knowledge they contain gets more familiar, which is inevitable among a certain class of books. I now read more language agnostic books on algorithms, math, and some broader concepts. We'll see how that goes. Sara Goleman has a book on writing extensions for PHP that you might like if you want to 'cross the threshold.' These sorts of things can be useful to know how it all works internally, even if you aren't writing a ton of extensions yourself. The Schlossnagle book has a chapter on that. I'm not sure how much movement PHP internals have (I'm out of that world now).