http://www.phpconference.co.uk/talk/php-under-hood The beauty of PHP is that everybody can read the code and see the inner workings of software. But understanding concepts from reading code isn't often helpful, especially if you are not proficient in that language. This presentation will take apart many parts of the PHP runtime, describe the concepts behind so attendees understand the inner workings without actually reading C code. Concepts covered include HashTables, the foundation for PHP arrays and many other internal data structures, the reference counting mechanism, which is important for writing efficient code as well as the overall executor. Johannes Schlüter is involved with the PHP community for more than 10 years. As an active contributor to the PHP project he is serving as Release Manager for the PHP 5.3 series. Working on PHP is also part of his job at Oracle's MySQL Engineering team where he is an engineer in the MySQL Connectors and Client Connectivity group. He's blogs regularly and lives in Munich, Germany.