Customer Reviews

Object-Oriented PHP: Concepts, Techniques, and Code

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Object-Oriented PHP is really a technical brief that seems to fall short of its own ambitions. It covers PHP 5, most notably the radical switch from prior versions to a full OOP model. Lavin summarizes the reasons for the changes and reviews basic concepts of OOP. He then develops some classes for an application that draws images from a database and displays thumbnail images. In some places the PHP 4 equivalent code is provided for study. Notes on MySQL and PHP Data Objects (PDO) are also included.

It is a terse and sometimes bumpy ride. The book's conversational tone is appropriate for fellow geeks, but I found it more distracting than reassuring. There are some summary apologies, for example, that make the chapters seem like they were transcribed from tape. Rather than go back and match the introductory objectives to the text, a summary or two admits things didn't quite work out as planned. Ok, let's say there was no time to fix it. How does calling attention to it help?

Because the book is so short, the author glosses many concepts, frequently referring to web sites for technical details and tutorials. Once or twice he refers to a well-known author (e.g., Bruce Eckel) to support a complex point. Again while this is appropriate for a peer audience, it also needlessly puts the book out of reach for some readers.

It seems to me the book once had a too-ambitious outline. The back cover states you'll learn to "Incorporate AJAX into your OO PHP code." The coverage on this topic is trivial: an eight-line paragraph that names a website from which to retrieve example code, followed by indicators in subsequent to show where the AJAX reference is. The reader would be right to feel misled.

This book should be useful to the author's PHP peers, but those same readers should understand OOP well beforehand. I doubt a skeptical or demanding reader will like this book. Beginners will almost certainly get lost early and often.

From the perspective of a an experienced procedural PHP programmer learning OO, having read both this book and "PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice" by Matt Zandstra, I would definately recommend the latter to this book.

Just because Zandstra's book doesn't have a cartoon on the front, doesn't make it less accessible. In fact I found it both more advanced and easier to understand at the same time. I imagine Lavin writing this book one chapter at a time, writing each successive chapter based on what he forgot in the previous. Zandstra's order of explanation on the other hand I found invaluable and thoughtful. When you're trying to make sense of a system by reading about it in a linear (book) explanation, the order in which the information is introduced and its context is very important.

Zandstra's book is also more thorough, and seems to approach implementation from an enterprise (read proper) perspective.

Lavin spends a lot of time on an example of using OO to build a system to display images in a directory. In hindsight, it turns out the design of his code is flawed in some places. Introduction material is no place to be teaching bad habits of any kind.

This book is $10 cheaper than Objects, Patterns, and Practice, but I think if you're serious about learning OO in PHP the extra $10 is worth it for a higher quality book.

Object-Oriented PHP by Peter Lavin is a good book for any traditional/procedural PHP programmer who would like to know what those object-oriented PHP programmers are so excited about. If you are considering adding object-oriented PHP to your toolbox and want a step-by-step, example based guide for the beginner, this is a good book to start with. This book is also for programmers who want to switch from PHP 4 to PHP 5.

Lavin starts with an overview of object-oriented PHP and discusses several of its advantages. He then discusses the basics of object-oriented programming such as classes and inheritance and the specifics for this type of programming in PHP. Next, he teaches you how to write your first class. One of the nice things about this book is that the author starts with this simple example and, as you progress through the book, shows how to build upon, extend and reuse that simple class to do more advanced programming.

The first step is to extend this class into a directory item class that will list all the files in a directory or list just certain files as needed. Next, you will write a thumbnail class that will create thumbnail images on-the-fly that are reduce in dimensions and quality thus reducing the download time. The third class you write is a page navigation class, similar to that used by Google, that will control the number of items listed on a page and also the number of page links in the navigation. Finally, he shows you how these three classes work together and with CSS.

Next, Lavin discusses the MySQL database class and how it works with the MySQL database. He also covers inheritance and how that can be applied to simplify error handling. He then moves on to abstract classes, magic methods and how dynamic websites can benefit from the SimpleXML extension to work with RSS feeds and the SOAP extension for a website search engine. We all hate to document our programs and Lavin shows you how to use the reflection class to self-document your code.

Peter Lavin has a web development firm and writes for several publications including PHP Hacks. There is a companion website that contains downloads of all the code and working examples.

This book is clear, easy to follow, and straight to the point. It presents a wealth of useful information on OOP in a style unmatched by nearly any PHP book I've seen.

With this book I have built most wanted PHP classes like DirectoryItems, ThumbnailImages, Pagination and more. The logic of classes is amazing. I have bought lots of books on PHP and after reading them I donate them to the library. But this is one of the few books that always sits on my desk.

There are lots of practical information in this book and I easily implemented them on my website.

So many computer books today are 800 pages of word bloat. The author not only keeps the writing lively but he gives a lot of information in succinct way.

However I don't recommend this book for beginners. You are expected to know basics of PHP programming.

The only small criticism I have about the book is that I dislike that the author don't include the whole code in the book for some classes and you have to download the code from the accompanying website. I like the whole code be present in the book.

I would like the author to write more books on PHP esp. PHP classes. It would be wonderful to write another book devoted to just common classes because I love the way the author writes PHP classes which make my life as a programmer much easier.

I consider myself an advanced PHP user, I have read a few other PHP books, but I'm always looking to learn something new in the field. This book definitely is for beginners. Up to chapter 9 and so far we've learned not much except how to resize an image and handle multi-page navigation. Chapter 10 (out of 16) deals for the first time with static variables and connecting to a database. There is a brief section on patterns which covers 1 (yes one) pattern, the singleton. Anyways, this book is not bad, it's well written just don't expect to learn much new if you are a seasoned PHP programmer.

I would recommend "PHP 5 Objects, Patterns And Practice", Zandstra, if you are looking for advanced coding techniques.

I have used PHP procedurally for several years, and had some inkling of OOP, but no formal introduction yet. I was happy with the three introductory chapters laying the groundwork for the body of the book. I was also able to implement the classes developed as examples in this book with some added/modified methods. The author is a highly talented programmer and gives the reader an insight into his use and development of meaningful classes. The back cover presents this effort as an introduction to Object Oriented Programming, and fair enough, the concepts are clear. The summary also presents this as an 'easy to follow' guide to OO PHP. Not. It is one thing to sit in your recliner and read text and say, "Uh huh. Got it" and quite another to actually understand how to build the examples and implement them so that your time is not wasted.

It is possible to use this book to learn OO PHP, but only with great willingness to search far and wide for supporting documentation to items mysteriously introduced without explanation. I seriously doubt any reviewer that rated this effort highly, stepped through the code line by line, chapter by chapter, entering their own programming notes into their code and understanding each step.

For me, the time required to research all of the items introduced in each chapter to the point of knowing the 'why' of each step was excessive. A specific example of an item being introduced without proper explanation is the introduction of the 'Iterator' interface in Chapter 10. There is no mention that interfaces are part of the Standard PHP Library (SPL), or that the Iterator functions are listed there. At least, in the context of the chapter, that is how it read to me. No explanation of how we know the behaviors or properties. I found myself digging into PHP's C/C++ source code to understand subjects glossed over in the text of the book. Further reading at the end of Ch. 11, almost two chapters later, then referenced the fact that Iterator was a built-in function and where to find the info. A little deeper digging reveals that in fact, reference was made in one of the introductory chapters, ch. 3, p.14. The 'we won't deal with the details here, but the download files have the proper code' or the information is somewhere else does not seem reader friendly. This is the default method in this book, making it frustrating to extract the knowledge in a meaningful, time effective way.

I guess I have become spoiled to the books written by author Larry Ullman and hold other instructional texts to that standard. If Ullman introduces a concept, he covers the details and has every line of code actually IN the text of the book. The process of actually including the code, not just highlight snippets, evidently causes a more thorough thought process on the part of the author and results in clear, easily understood explanations rather than opaque references to behaviors and definitions that the reader must seek out.

It is great accomplishment just to write a book, and I am grateful to all authors and this one in particular for sharing his knowledge. The style of reading required, i.e. reading pseudo 'back to front' in various sections was somewhat disconcerting. My view is that if you already know Object Oriented Programming and probably already know PHP OOP and have a thorough knowledge of the SPL, this is a great resource. I believe if this book were re-packaged so that expectations for the content were different, it would be a 5-star book. The knowledge gained from stepping through is useful and lasting, and expensive time-wise.

If your new to PHP, this isn't the book for you, learning procedurally to program PHP before you delve into OOP should definitely be a beginner's plan of attack, and the concepts in this book are almost entirely OOP.

That being said, if you do want to learn OOP, then I'm sure there's something to gain from this book. I despise the wordiness and am more of a visual learner. I find charts and plenty of examples are easier to learn from.

I think the biggest drawback of this book is the lengthy explanations and $2 words. If your up for the challenge, or sincerely want to grasp PHP OOP then you should probably add this book to your collection, but don't expect it to be an easy read.

I'll agree with others and say that Mike Zandstra's book covers this topic better. The author goes through one example throughout the book (using classes to manipulate a file directory) without fulling explaining how some of the topics work. For example, the author gives a code example, say in english what it's doing to the files, but doesn't explain how.

On the flip side, it is a good book for explaining what OOP is and why it's such and advance for PHP. I just wouldn't use this book to learn it.

As other reviewers have stated, this is defiantly not a book that will teach you object oriented programming, nor, have I found a book that teaches all the concepts of OOP and how to program php in conjunction with one another.

I would recommend that if you want to learn OOP, then read the book "Head First Java" -- you will know OOP inside and out. From there, if you have a little procedural PHP under your belt, the syntax of Java and PHP are nearly identical.

If you already know OOP, but need to learn how to define classes etc, in PHP, this is an excellent resource and a good read.

I'll get this out of the way up front; I approached this book with a completely inaccurate perception of what it was going to give me. I would consider myself an intermediate to advanced php developer, and I was hoping this book would teach me awesome ways to use PHP5's OOP power to make my applications better, faster, and more attractive to women. That wasn't what this book does. This book introduces OOP, explains why it's useful, and goes through to develop several sample applications to demonstrate OOPs power, and more importantly how to use it.

The books pretty thin weighing in at 216 pages, split up amongst 15 chapters. The first bit of the book concentrates on explaining what OOP is, why PHP needs it, and why you want it. It then moves on to explain why OOP sucked in PHP4, what works better in PHP5, and all the fancy new words you're going to need to memorize to use it (protected, private, etc.). It then moves on to develop a sample indexing application, adding in thumbnail generation as the book progresses. Later on more advanced topics like design patterns, interfaces and exceptions are introduced. Finally the book gives a brief introduction to SPL which was introduced in PHP5 and improved in PHP5.1.

Overall I would recommend this book to beginner PHP developers, or intermediate developers who have not yet gotten their feet wet with OO.