PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice (Expert's Voice in Open Source) [Paperback]

Matt Zandstra (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 7, 2010 | ISBN-10: 143022925X | ISBN-13: 978-1430229254 | Edition: 3

This book takes you beyond the PHP basics to the enterprise development practices used by professional programmers. Updated for PHP 5.3 with new sections on closures, namespaces, and continuous integration, this edition will teach you about object features such as abstract classes, reflection, interfaces, and error handling. You’ll also discover object tools to help you learn more about your classes, objects, and methods.

Then you’ll move into design patterns and the principles that make patterns powerful. You’ll learn both classic design patterns and enterprise and database patterns with easy-to-follow examples.

Finally, you’ll discover how to put it all into practice to help turn great code into successful projects. You’ll learn how to manage multiple developers with Subversion, and how to build and install using Phing and PEAR. You’ll also learn strategies for automated testing and building, including continuous integration.

Taken together, these three elements—object fundamentals, design principles, and best practices—will help you develop elegant and rock-solid systems.

What you’ll learn

• Learn to work with object fundamentals: writing classes and methods, instantiating objects, and creating powerful class hierarchies using inheritance.
• Master advanced object-oriented features, including static methods and properties.
• Learn how to manage error conditions with exceptions, and create abstract classes and interfaces.
• Understand and use design principles to deploy objects and classes effectively in your projects.
• Learn about design patterns, their purpose and structure, and the underlying principles that govern them.
• Discover a set of powerful patterns that you can deploy in your own projects.
• Learn about the tools and practices that can guarantee a successful project including unit testing; version control; build, installation, and package management; and continuous integration.

Who this book is for

This book is suitable for anyone with at least a basic knowledge of PHP who wants to use its object-oriented features in their projects.

Those who already know their interfaces from their abstracts may well still find it hard to use these features in their projects. These users will benefit from the book’s emphasis on design. They will learn how to choose and combine the participants of a system, how to read design patterns, and how to use them in their code.

Finally, this book is for PHP coders who want to learn about the practices and tools (version control, testing, continuous integration, etc.) that can make projects safe, elegant, and stable.

Table of Contents

1. PHP: Design and Management
2. PHP and Objects
3. Object Basics
4. Advanced Features
5. Object Tools
6. Objects and Design
7. What Are Design Patterns? Why Use Them?
8. Some Pattern Principles
9. Generating Objects
10. Patterns for Flexible Object Programming
11. Performing and Representing Tasks
12. Enterprise Patterns
13. Database Patterns
14. Good (and Bad) Practice
15. An Introduction to PEAR and Pyrus
16. Generating Documentation with phpDocumentor
17. Version Control with Subversion
18. Testing with PHPUnit
19. Automated Build with Phing
20. Continuous Integration
21. Objects, Patterns, Practice

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

 

Matt Zandstra has worked as a web programmer, consultant, and writer for nearly two decades.

He is the author of SAMS Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours (three editions) and a contributor to DHTML Unleashed. He has written articles for Linux Magazine, Zend.com, IBM DeveloperWorks, and php|architect Magazine, among others.

Matt works as a consultant advising companies on their architectures and system management, and also develops systems primarily with PHP, and Java. 

Matt also writes fiction.

 

Product Details

• Paperback: 536 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 3 edition (June 7, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 143022925X
• ISBN-13: 978-1430229254
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #326,198 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #80 in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development & Design > Programming > PHP

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good book, despite some muddled spots March 20, 2008

By Kevin D A Major

Format:Paperback

I've owned PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice for over a year, and it's still one of those books I go back to. It's a well written, generally well executed book on what constitutes Object Oriented Programming in the PHP5 environment.

First, the good news:

This book is a crash course on OOP design and thought. It borrows heavily from two monumentous texts in the field - the Gang of Four's book, and Java Enterprise Patterns - and condences their essences into an easy to swallow form. The basics are all here: how to create well designed classes, how to instantiate objects, etc. There's a hidden gem in the introductory portion of the book: the Reflection API. This API is built into PHP, and gives the coder unparalleled access to the guts of the classes and objects in a given project. It definitely has its uses.

The patterns are all generally useful, with the only exception perhaps being the Interpreter pattern. I'm just not convinced that creating one's own command line interface syntax is necessary, given that PHP projects aren't usually interactive. It seems like something best left to an appendex, or extra web content.

Now, for the bad news:

Some sections of the book, especially some of the code examples, could've used a better editor. Small things, the kinds of things that can trip up inexperienced coders, crop up. Using private properties instead of protected. Using the wrong variable name between examples. That sort of thing.

There's also a lack of a satisfying conclusion, so-to-speak. Zandstra himself claims that generating objects is perhaps the hardest thing to demonstrate. Yet, most of his examples (excepting the patterns late in the book) are canned. Objects and classes exist only to drive the theory behind a pattern home. Few real world examples are given. Admittedly, some patterns are simple to transfer to a real project, but concrete examples of that nature could serve to further cement his point. For example, it's not difficult to see how the Composite pattern would work well for dealing with an XML document, but would there ever be a need for a Visitor object to act on one?

Finally, and in continuation of my last criticism, Zandstra never touches one of the things PHP is used the most for: form handling. Can forms be represented by classes? Could forms be generated by objects (perhaps using a Factory pattern)? What about form validators? Wouldn't the Strategy or Decorator pattern work? Supplementing his online Civilization game and CLI/quiz examples with this would've really put the book over the top.

Still, with that said, PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice is still a text that gets far more right than wrong. It's definitely a must-buy for those PHP coders looking to write modular code.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Kindle version has one small problem February 16, 2011

By Andrew M Heath

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

In terms of content, this is an excellent book. It is probably a little too heavy for absolute PHP beginners, unless you're already well-versed in other modern programming languages. For people who only know PHP, or who don't know any languages and are looking to start with PHP, you should make sure you have a strong grasp of procedural PHP before heading this way.

That being said, the Kindle version has one major issue: the code samples. They look like someone printed them out with a dot-matrix printer, then scanned them at 150 DPI, saved as BMPs to preserve all the visual errors on the scan, and pasted them into the book as images. In other words, the code samples are not text at all - they are really, really crappy images and you will often find yourself squinting to make out all the details of the fuzzy "text".

This isn't a dealbreaker - after all, any programming book you buy today has downloadable samples of all code available somewhere on the Internet... but it IS an annoyance. Why they couldn't produce the code in real text with an alternate font I have no idea. Why they couldn't present higher quality images of the code I also have no idea.

Suffice to say, if you buy this for the Kindle, expect 5 star content with 3 star presentation - thereby bringing us to 4 overall.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Best OO book on PHP ever March 18, 2008

By Stats

Format:Paperback

This is the best book I've read on Object Orientated PHP. This book does a great job of explaining the ins and outs of OO in PHP 5. As a self taught PHP developer of 5 years, I had lots of questions about "am I doing this right", "how should this be done" and the book has answered most of those questions.

I'd recommend the book to those who already have an advanced PHP knowledge but are looking to take their code another step forward by improving it's re-usability. It's also a great read if you want to find out the power that PHP 5 has over PHP 4.

Note: this book doesn't contain code that you can use. It teaches you the principles that you should use in your own projects.