Sometimes the things you'll find on a bookshelves of your local book store can be quite unusual and downright weird. Consider the following super-hero themed series of books on Windows products by O'Reilly.

The 3rd release candidate for PHP 5.2.1 is now available for download. The tarballs can be found here: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.1RC3.tar.bz2 (d3889eda8c3471ce7cf2adb35a4de736) http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.1RC3.tar.gz (c5b3e5540d1951d4c4b976b8a39c09ab) and the Win32 binaries will be available in short order. Since the last release, there are over 20 different bug fixes resolving some annoying engine issues such as the tempval leak inside foreach(). We do not anticipate any regressions to be introduced by this RC, but I would still like to ask everyone to take a few minutes and test it against their code base. If you come across any issues please report them at http://bugs.php.net/. Depending on the stability of this release it may either be followed by a final release or another RC, therefor your feedback is critical to determining whether or not the code is stable enough to warrant the 5.2.1 final.

Thanks to Steph's hard work the last few months of weeklies are now available for reading. If you don't have the time or keep an eye on what's going on in the PHP community, especially on the developer mailing lists, weeklies are a quick shortcut to getting yourself up to date.

After a few month break since the last release, a new version of FUDforum is once again in the works. This is primarily a feature enhancement release with a slew of new functionality designed to improve the forum. Aside from the new feature a fair number of bug fixes is also available, so something for everyone ;-) As you can tell from the version, this is release candidate, so its not quite perfect yet, but I am hoping that within a month the release process can be wrapped up and stable be released. The install script can be found here and the upgrade script here. The release announcement detailing all of the major changes can be found here.

As you may already know or soon will find out MySQL had released a new version of their community server, 5.0.33. First all congratulations to developers, any release is a lot of work and finally pushing it out the public is definitely an achievement. There are however some interesting and in my eyes less then positive developments pertaining to this release. As you can see from Kaj's announcement as well as the state of the MySQL's download page pre-compiled binaries are no longer offered. The only files available for MySQL 5.0.33 are sources for *NIX and Windows platforms. While this is not an issue for NIX users where lack of binaries will be resolved by distros and if not, the compiler is always available and compiling MySQL is big issue, it does pose a major problem for Windows users who generally do not have access to a C/C++ compiler. This means that all the people who develop on Win32 and then deploy on NIX machines will need to stick to older versions of the database for the dev environme...