Who is the book aimed at?
June 7, 2008
This was a question I wrestled with when starting the book. I personally have been doing PHP since 1996, so I’m not a ‘newbie’ either with PHP, or in the job market. I’ve found that the further you go on in your career, the more specialized a job hunt can end up being. Besides geographic considerations, there are more financial and time constraints, as well as longer term career goals to consider when job hunting. Because of that, I decided to focus this first edition primarily at people in an early or mid-stage of their professional life.
New to the job market
People just entering the job market fresh out of school, or just getting in to PHP development from some other career from another discipline are both types of people who would get the most value from this book. That’s not to say there’s nothing valuable for more senior developers, for example, but it’s much harder for me personally to judge how much value there would be.
I was speaking with enygma from phpdeveloper.org about the book the other day, and he asked if people *hiring* PHP developers would benefit from the book. It was an interesting question, because my initial thought on this question a year ago was a flat “no”. The text of book didn’t talk to those people, and I wasn’t even considering those types of readers. On thinking about it some more, it did seem that there were some types of hiring managers who would benefit from the book after all.
New to the interviewing game
If you’re a hiring decision maker in a small shop, and you’ve not dealt much with web developers yet, either freelance or fulltime, this book will give you an idea of the current state of PHP technology and some of the sorts of skills you should expect people to have coming in to the job market. This isn’t to say that you will *need* all of those skills or technologies listed, but it should give you a better idea of what’s going on, and could serve as a bit of a BS detector when talking to PHP candidates. I’ve found that some people try to bluff their way through interviews.
If you’re in a large IT shop already, or have lots of experience with PHP/web developers, it’s harder for people to bluff you, but if not, this book may serve as a good starting point. This blog post has a good discussion on the problems of finding good PHP developers, and bluffing or inflating one’s capabilities still seems to be rampant out there.
Posted in 
