Customer Reviews

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

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

 

 

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.

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.

PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice is the book I've been looking for. As a novice PHP developer it answered a lot of the questions I've had about the next steps to becoming an effective developer. Through the PHP object model, design patterns, and then putting it all together this is a must have book for any one wanting to take the next steps in their PHP knowledge.

The PHP object section is worth the cost of admission alone with this title. Not only covering the updates to PHP 5.3 but showing how to use them. From the coverage of the php "magic functions" to those of you struggling to put together a solid object model this is one of the most clearly written descriptions I've read. The examples of how to use abstract classes and inheritance effectively are especially helpful and setup a great transition to working with design patterns.

Design Patterns make up the meat of this book, and rightly so. I finally get the purpose of design patterns and how to use them with my work. Although, I'm by far not an expert on the topic, from a learning perspective, it is a spot on effective at teaching the principles of this sometimes complicated area.

The Practice portion of this book is the only area I could see some better coverage on. While the topics and tools are covered expertly, it feels dated. From my experience with the PHP/Open source community, the tools covered are being eclipsed by distributed version control, and tighter IDE support. While I know folks are still using SVN, it would have been nice to see an updated chapter on using git or Mercurial.

PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice is an excellent book. If you are wanting to learn more about the very important topics covered, then this is probably the best starting point out there.

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.

I rather like this book. PHP is not well served by intelligent discussions of advanced OOP design -it's a pragmatic but ugly language so most of the really smart hackers tend to congregate around the elegance of Ruby or Python. Matt Zandstra is a good PHP programmer and fills this gap quite well.

The structure is logical, moving from OOP syntax and basic concepts through tactical object patterns to their application in more strategic enterprise and data patterns. It closes by surveying more general areas of good development practice such as testing and version control.

Covering so much ground the pace is rapid, so you'll likely struggle unless you are fluent with basic PHP and have a smattering of OOP knowledge.

The reason for my 4 star rating is the way that Matt highlights the practical value and application of the patterns he covers. The general approach is to show how a seat-of-the-pants approach can get you into trouble as your system evolves, and how the judicious application of patterns can strengthen separation of concerns and flexibility. I have a couple of other pattern books, but they are more academic and leave you wondering how you would actually use these ideas. Matt's approach is more successful.

I've dropped a star because there are too many areas where the writing could be clearer, particularly in the Enterprise Pattern section. And there are areas where I feel he has backed the wrong horse - for example the version control section focuses on Subversion, while these days the OS community seems to centre around Git and GitHub.

But if you are an intermediate developer you should emerge from the process with significantly stronger skills.

There is however, a major caveat. I have read many thousands of books in my time, and THIS IS THE MOST ILLEGIBLE LAYOUT I HAVE EVER HAD TO CONTEND WITH. The font is too small, the lines are too long, and the leading is too crowded. It's incomprehensible that a professional publisher should treat their readers with such contempt. They should either add more pages or cut some of the more specialised content (for example there are long sections on creating PEAR packages and Domain Specific Languages which most readers will find little use for).

All in all, though, a decent effort full of practical ideas you will find yourself using in your day-to-day work.

A excellent reference book on design patterns in PHP. Clear, concise, concrete and easy to read. It has several code examples that helps to understand the theory applied to the practice.

I really enjoyed reading this book.
Gives good examples and tells you when they are appropriate to use.
Well written. I read it cover to cover.