Of course, Pro PHP Programming gives a thorough survey of PHP post-5.3. You'll begin by working through an informative survey and clear guide to object-oriented PHP. Then, you'll be set for the core of the book on modern PHP applications. Now, you'll be able to start with the chapter on PHP for mobile programming and move on to sampling social media applications. You'll also be guided through new PHP programming language features like closures and namespaces.

Pro PHP Programming deals with filtering data from users and databases next, so you'll be well prepared for relational and NoSQL databases. Of course, you can also learn about data retrieval from other sources, like OCR libraries or websites. Then the question of how to format and present data arises, and in Pro PHP Programming, you'll find solutions via JSON, AJAX and XML.