random observations on online PHP manual

(my technical editor streak coming to the fore, representing just some thoughts on reading up to but not including the language reference so far.) * it's not clear what version of PHP the online manual refers to. i would *guess* that it's the output of a fairly recent build of the doc trunk, but it wouldn't hurt to make that explicitly clear at the beginning somewhere. * not sure if this is covered further into the manual than i've read so far, but i learned quickly that on some versions of linux (in my case, fedora), a *lot* of the PHP modules and extensions have been packages as yum-installable packages. a lot of the PEAR packages as well. i'm wondering if that's worth mentioning fairly early on for readers running particular linux distros. * http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php "Don't be afraid [of?] reading the long list of PHP's features." * http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro-whatcando.php "You can make a PHP script to run it without any server or browser." - that's a really awkward sentence "... extends the feature set adding SimpleXML and XMLReader support." - is there a reason to mention XMLReader but not XMLWriter? (what *is* the state of XML support in PHP these days? must keep reading.) * very early on, i might be tempted to have a short section explaining how readers can examine the current state of PHP on their system, mostly from the command line. when i was starting out, i was thrilled to discover "php -m". a short page walking readers through something like: $ php --help $ php -v $ php -m $ php -i and so on would probably not hurt, and it's something they could do with no further background, just to verify that they have a working and properly-configured PHP setup. * http://www.php.net/manual/en/configuration.file.php - it might be worth telling the reader about "php --ini" here, and perhaps other ini-related php CLI options. i found the above comment really useful early on. rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry. Web page: http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday ========================================================================