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 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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19207 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 487 pages

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"

An excellent book
I work as a PHP developer in a local company. I wanted to take my PHP to the next level - to gain an intimate understanding of the object oriented features of the language. To find out how to develop larger systems while still keeping maintainability. I feel so lucky to have chosen this book. I am half way through it and already I know so much more about PHP, I am using interfaces, abstract classes, and the strategy pattern in my real work.

If you are like I was: pretty good at PHP with some object oriented knowledge (mostly in other languages) and you want to bring your PHP to speed this book is *perfect*.

Another thing I really like is that for the first time in a programming book the examples seem highly relevant, easily understandible, without being drawn out, long-winded, over complicated or full of caveats. I can actually read many pages at a time without my eyes glazing over!

I want to personally thank the author for such a quality title, and thoroughly recommend it to anyone wanting PHP books.

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.