Product Description

Backed by a tireless development community, PHP has been a model of language evolution over its 10+ year history. Borne from a contract developer’s pet project, these days you’ll find PHP powering many of the world’s largest web sites, including Yahoo!, Digg, EA Games, and Lycos.

PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice, Second Edition shows you how to meld the power of PHP with the sound enterprise development techniques embraced by professional programmers. Going well beyond the basics of object–oriented development, you’ll learn about advanced topics such as working with static methods and properties, abstract classes, interfaces, design patterns, exception handling, and more. You’ll also be exposed to key tools such as PEAR, CVS, Phing, and phpDocumentor.

What you’ll learn

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47958 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 487 pages

Synopsis
Backed by a tireless development community, PHP has been a model of language evolution over its 10+ year history. Borne from a contract developer s pet project, these days you ll find PHP powering many of the world s largest web sites, including Yahoo!, Digg, EA Games, and Lycos. PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice, Second Edition shows you how to meld the power of PHP with the sound enterprise development techniques embraced by professional programmers. Going well beyond the basics of object oriented development, you ll learn about advanced topics such as working with static methods and properties, abstract classes, interfaces, design patterns, exception handling, and more. You ll also be exposed to key tools such as PEAR, CVS, Phing, and phpDocumentor. What you ll learn * Write solid, maintainable code by embracing object oriented techniques and design patterns. * Create detailed, versatile documentation using the powerful phpDocumentor automated documentation system. * Gain new flexibility during the development process by managing your code within a CVS repository and using the Phing build system.*

Capitalize upon the quality code of others by using the PEAR package management solution. Who is this book for? PHP developers seeking to embrace sound development techniques such as object orientation, design patterns, testing, and documentation

About the Author
Matt Zandstra has worked as a Web programmer, consultant and writer for a decade. He has been an object evangelist for most of that time. Matt is the author of SAMS Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours (three editions), and contributed to DHTML Unleashed. He has written articles for Linux Magazine and Zend.com. Matt works primarily with PHP, Perl and Java, building online applications. He is an engineer at Yahoo! in London.

Matt lives in Brighton with his wife Louise, and two children, Holly and Jake. Because it has been so long since he has had any spare time he only distantly recollects that he runs regularly to offset the effects of his liking for pubs and cafes, and for sitting around reading and writing fiction. Learn more on Matt's website, getInstance.

Customer Reviews

Its a must have
I went from Agnostic to Convert in one easily understood book. I have gone from being a competent procedural programmer who dabbled in objects, to being a staunch advocate of PHP objects and patterns.

If you don't quite get what the OOP fuss is about, read this book and you won't look back. You'll start every sentence with "code to an interface, not an implementation"

Every php developer should get a copy
As hinted in the title, this near 500 page tome is split into three parts: objects, patterns and [best] practice.
The section on objects covers the basics and then the advanced features of object oriented facilities in PHP and tools such as namespaces, autoloading and the reflection classes along with design basics, class scope, encapsulation, polymorphism and some UML.
The patterns section is obviously inspired by "The Gang of Four" (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides) and covers what design patterns are, enterprise patterns, database patterns and also the basic patterns such as the factory, fascade, decorator and composite patterns along with a few more. This section is far from comprehensive, but is a good start. (If Patterns do interest you, and they should, have a look at patternsforphp.com)
The last section, focuses on PEAR (including writing your own packages and setting up your own PEAR channel), phpDocumentor, unit testing with phpUnit, version control with CVS (which struck me as a bit odd - I had expected subversion to be covered either instead of or along with CVS) and setting up automated builds with phing.

While being an easy read, this is a well written, serious book and is aimed squarely at enterprise-level developers and software engineers who make their living through the development and architecture of solutions developed in PHP.
Any PHP developer wishing to improve his skills should get a copy.

Excellent book, finally an OOP book for programmers.
My programming background stems from procedural languages (xBase, clipper etc) popular in the late eighties. With Clipper 5 I had danced briefly with objects but likened them purely to a prettier way of dealing with big data structures.

Hey, I get a mention in the first chapter!

Well, not me personally, but my type of programmer. Better yet, it wasn't preceeded by the word "dinosaur".

Instead, I was told, and then shown, how OOP is far more than just a tidy way of handling arrays. And I was shown this with nice, short, stubby examples.

Best of all, the author recognised that OOP may not suit all requirements, and indeed, decent systems can be written without it. This is by no means a "Yah boo" text unlike a lot of the online OOP guides you may have read.

I haven't finished this book yet, but already it has far exceeded my expectations. I am an experienced programmer, but pretty much new to proper oop, so was looking for a book which would start with the oop basics but then do some real serious grown-up stuff with it. I have not been let down.