Top Books on PHP Modern PHP - Josh Lockhart - 2015 - Brings PHP into the modern era: namespaces, traits, generators, Composer, and best practices. PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice, 6th Ed. - Matt Zandstra - 2021 - OOP, design patterns, and professional PHP workflows. Laravel: Up & Running, 3rd Ed. - Matt Stauffer - 2023 - The definitive practical guide to Laravel 10: Blade, Eloquent, testing, APIs, Passport, Cashier. Laravel Up & Running, 2nd Ed. - Matt Stauffer - 2020 - Laravel 6/7: routing, MVC, validation, queues, and deployment. PHP 8 Objects, Patterns, and Practice - Matt Zandstra - 2021 - PHP 8 features, design patterns, and tools (Composer, PHPUnit, Git). Designing Data-Intensive PHP Applications - Chris Pitt - 2020 - Data modeling, storage, and performance for PHP at scale. Laravel: The Full-Stack Framework (official docs) - Laravel team - 2024 - Official documentation; free, always current.