Emma Jane Hogbin and Lorna Jane Mitchell have a great remote workshop coming up in September, described in detail at http://phpfordevelopers.com/workshop. Everything about it looks exciting, except maybe the 6am start time :)
From their intro:
This spring Emma Jane and Lorna Jane were chatting about PHP and Drupal and workshops and came to the conclusion that Drupal developers were not necessarily equipped for Drupal 8. With all of the Drupalisms in the Drupal code, it can sometimes be difficult to implement code that is both a Drupal best practice and a PHP best practice. While there are many workshops on how to teach PHP developers how to Drupal, there were no workshops teaching Drupal developers how to PHP. Until now!
The workshop will cover object oriented programming, design patterns, Symfony2 and new language features as of PHP 5.3 that some Drupal-focused developers may not be aware of. Read more about the workshop.
There's an interesting funding model. If they secure 25 company signups, the curriculum will be released under the GPL. OpenSourcery is one of the first 10 companies to commit. If you are a freelance developer or a shop who can't afford the $1500 entrance fee but you can share some of the cost with us, join the OpenSourcery team in attending. "And yes, getting other people on board through a single company is exactly right (and encouraged)," Emma Jane says.
Sign up on this event using the button below if you're interested and we'll work out the details toward the end of the August.
Note that only one sponsorship logo goes on the material, so if you can afford the entrance fee and you want to show your support for great Open Source training materials you'll probably want to get your own!
If you have questions, contact me or find me at the next usergroup meetup. http://drupal.org/user/33570/contact