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

Matt Zandstra (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 143022925X | ISBN-13: 978-1430229254 | Publication Date: June 7, 2010 | 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 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, U.K. 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.com.

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 9.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #88,806 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 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 (Earth) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice, Third Edition (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Kindle Edition)

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 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too little attention was payed to the presentation of the book, October 17, 2010

By 

Jeroen Hoek - See all my reviews

This review is from: PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

While Matt Zandstra does a fairly good job of introducing, explaining, and showcasing a good number of useful design patterns for use with PHP 5, PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice just doesn't read very well. My main gripe isn't with the content, but rather with the visual presentation of it. Typographically, the book is not very well designed; the body text is typeset in paragraphs with way too many characters on a single line, and not nearly enough space between the lines. This makes the book tiresome to read for more than a few pages at a time.

I bought this book partly because of I was already familiar with another book in this Apress series, namely The Definitive Guide to SQLite, which is not only very well written, but also pleasant to read. I was surprised to learn that two books from the same series could differ so much in terms of visual quality.

A revised edition would benefit from having a professional editor or typographer redoing the layout.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dense, intelligent, bad examples, August 18, 2010

By 

Dusan Bosnjakovic - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

This book is well written and the concepts are well explained. The examples are not well introduced and explained, however, so that it is difficult to follow as well as generalize the example to a broader concept. This is a problem that I've found with pattern books before however. This is not a beginner book by any means and extensive OOP PHP experience is required.