Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
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.

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.

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.

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.