PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra

by Matt Zandstra

PHP 5's object-oriented enhancements are among the most significant improvements in the 10+ year history of the language. This book introduces you to those features and the many opportunities they provide, as well as a number of tools that will help you maximize development efforts. The book begins with a broad overview of PHP 5's object-oriented features, introducing key topics like class declaration, object instantiation, inheritance, and method and property encapsulation. You’ll also learn about advanced topics including static methods and properties, abstract classes, interfaces, exception handling, object cloning, and more. You’ll also benefit from an extensive discussion regarding object-oriented design best practices. The next part of the book is devoted to a topic that is often a natural extension of any object-oriented design patterns. PHP 5 is particularly well-suited to the deployment of these solutions for commonly occurring programming problems. The author will introduce pattern concepts and show you how to implement several key patterns in your PHP applications. The last segment introduces a number of great utilities that help you document, manage, test, and build your PHP applications, including Phing, PHPUnit2, phpDocumentor, PEAR, and CVS.

Genres: Programming, Nonfiction, Software, Technology

Paperback

First published December 21, 2004

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, of which I read a few chapters before returning to the library, has some excellent tips on the birds-eye view of software design with a ton of specific tips and examples and a focus on design patterns. And, obviously, is about PHP 5. The book focuses on object-oriented programming and design patterns, as the title implies, and does an excellent job of describing what each of those are, how they are described and how they can be applied.

I will come back to this book when it is time to get a bit more hands on with PHP 5 programming, there's a lot left to learn! I found the book when searching for books about PHP at the library.

[Leland · Rating 4 out of 5]

By no means would I say this is a perfect treatment of oop with PHP, but it's readable, clear, informative and ultimately helpful. The first few chapters cover the fundamentals with excellent examples. The approach encourages experimentation, and I was designing and writing classes as I read. One doesn't read these types of book for any other reason, so based on the books effectiveness as a catalyst and guide for writing code, I can only give it a solid 4 out of 5 stars.

[Nickwshaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an awesome book, learned loads from it already and I am only halfway through.

[Marcus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this ages ago - Some bits good, others a bit disappointing and overcomplicated.

[Timothy Finucane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book if you want a refresher between php4 and php5.

[Azril Nazli]

Easy to understand. Helped me a lot while programming in MVC style