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 interaktivních internetových aplikací' - 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.