This is quite the thread and I'm having trouble following it, so maybe there's a reason why you're referencing such an old version, but you know PHP's currently on 7.4 right? Tons of progress over the last few years. If someone picks up a book that's 10 year's old or reads a blog post from 2010 and expects it to be 'current' then they have bigger issues. There are plenty of resources that cover modern PHP.