Dirk Merkel has been developing software in a variety of programming

languages for many years, including PHP, Java, Perl, and Ruby. His focus has

been on web-related technologies and he has over 10 years experience coding in

PHP. He has experience covering the whole software development cycle and has

been managing several teams of developers working on large-scale projects.

He has been working as a professional consultant through his company

Waferthin Web Works LLC (http://www.waferthin.com) and can be reached

at dirk@waferthin.com. He is also the Chief Technology Officer at VivanTech Inc.,

a San Diego based provider of IT solutions.

He has written several articles on software development and security.

Expert PHP 5 Tools is his first book.

He lives in San Diego with his lovely wife and two wonderful daughters.

This book will enable you to take your PHP development skills to an enterprise

level by teaching the skills and tools necessary to write maintainable and efficient

code. You will learn how to perform activities such as unit testing, enforcing coding

standards, automating deployment, and interactive debugging using tools created

for PHP developers—all the information in one place. Your code will be more

maintainable, efficient, and self-documenting.