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' (PHP - Creating Interactive Internet Applications) - 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. 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 400 books in English, over 100 books in German, and over 50 books in French or Spanish! In addition, you can find books about PHP in many other languages, including 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 world-wide success.
There are books in Swedish as well. I remember loaning a PHP book more than half a decade ago. Can't remember which PHP version it covered since I was only about 13-14 then. Frequent PHP programmer at home and .NET at work. PHP really opened up my eyes for programming and web development.
