A really, really good book. My only wish is that there was a Bastards book of PHP. There is no such practical, useful equivalent in the PHP world that I've found—and I've looked.
I had said awhile back that I would shoot for a Python version since the code tries to be as Ruby-idiom-free as possible...but I think I need to first focus on moving it to a more painless deploying process, such as github+jekyll...and hopefully make it easy for anyone to port over the lessons/examples in other (high-level) languages
I'd honestly want to help you enable this using http://ruhoh.com. it's jekyll inspired but made to be a lot more streamlined.
The stack is markdown and mustache. This would be a great way for me to see how I need to evolve the ruhoh platform.
Can't honestly say this is the best platform for your book but I am willing to dedicate time to your project to get this done for everyone's benefit. Please contact me and/or point me to the public repo if available. thanks!
I've been planning something along these lines for PHP, but PHP in and of itself has plenty of learning resources. That's not to say they're any good, per se.
The focus thus shifts on to correcting the many mistakes these other learning resources make. That might be poor security (SQL injection, XSS, etc.), use of deprecated functions (mysql_* functions), and maintaining your website as an unholy tangle of intermingled HTML, CSS, JS and PHP. This is what I'm more interested in doing.
I don't personally see much value in writing about much else (like, idiomatic PHP), because the language itself lacks an opinion on what good code and bad code is, or whether it should be procedural or OOP (see DateTime and mysqli for examples where there is an interface for both styles). Trying to establish a 'norm' for these things would be nothing less than Sisyphean in nature.
Compare this to Python and Ruby, where these books flourish because the language itself makes it easier to write about.
Let us know when its done! There's so much junk and old tutorials out there on PHP, it's very hard to know what's right and what's wrong. It's impossible to know where to start.
Starting from practical, useful exercises would be an amazing way to (finally) truly learn PHP.
Back when I was a PHP programmer the "PHP Cookbook" published by O'Reilly was a terrific resource. Unfortunately it looks like that isn't being maintained. Still might be worth picking out of the bargin bin though.
Maybe I'll ask Dan to write that one next =)