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 interaktivnÃch internetových aplikacÃ' - 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. Both of 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 40 books in English, 50 books in German, and over 20 books in French! In addition, you can find books about PHP in many other languages, including Spanish, 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.