After a sabbatical of a few years from the world of technology I'm trying to catch up on things. I've been going through the book PHP and MySQL by Hugh Williams and David Lane and notice they rely heavily on PEAR. I've never used it so I've been poking around the Internet and from what I can tell it's not a commonly use add-on - at least not anymore. The book was copyrighted in 2002 and 2004 which is an eternity in computer years, so I'm wondering if PEAR has been effectively replaced by other frameworks, and if so which ones.

Conceptually it looks like a good thing, but I don't want to go through the trouble of installing, learning and building stuff with it if it turns out that it's "old news".

Are any of you using PEAR? If not what about the other frameworks out there?

I did used pear, some years ago, but not anymore.
For me, Pear is not a framework, but more a repository of useful modules that expend the PHP core engine.

I'd rather look in the direction of the Zend framework [ http://framework.zend.com/ ], if you want to get back in pace.
I see regularly jobs offer specifying this framework, and Zend being the enterprise behind the PHP engine, it surely won't disappear over the next year.

Just my 2 cents...