PHP 5 Objects, Patterns and Practice [Paperback]

Matt Zandstra (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590593804 | ISBN-13: 978-1590593806 | Publication Date: January 2005 | Edition: 1

PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, Practice is a practical design and management book. It explains object-oriented programming in PHP 5, the latest version of PHP. This book explores the principles underlying design patterns (principally those patterns collected by the 'Gang of Four') and presents a range of patterns in a PHP context. This book also examines tools and practices that exist which underpin good software design, including unit testing, documentation, version control and automated build.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Matt Zandstra is the senior point of contact for new clients and is a partner and technical consultant for Corrosive. His company’s strategic emphasis is on original technical solutions, particularly in the field of content management. Matt is responsible for building much of the library code underpinning Corrosive's technical reputation. In addition to programming with Perl, PHP, and Java, Matt teaches Web design and programming within the New Media industry. Matt Zandstra is the author of SAMS Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours (1^st and 2^nd Editions) and contributing author to SAMS Dynamic HTML Unleashed.

Product Details

• Paperback: 438 pages
• Publisher: A-Press; 1 edition (January 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590593804
• ISBN-13: 978-1590593806
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #179,367 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Proper enterprise level respect for PHP5, January 14, 2005

By 

Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: PHP 5 Objects, Patterns and Practice (Paperback)

Fact of the matter is that PHP5 is a serious enterprise level development system. This book takes it seriously and presents both practical and architectural material at a level that used to be reserved for J2EE and .NET works. This relatively short book is packed full of well written and insightful content. It stars with the basics of PHP5 OO programming with detail about the mistakes in PHP4 that have now been rectified. That is taken all the way through advanced topics like reflection.

The author then switches gears and gets into the design of object oriented applications. Now that we have the right tools, how we should use them to make better systems, right? UML is covered, and so are design patterns.

The later chapters of the book cover solid software engineering practices, like version control and unit testing, amongst other.

Not only will this book give you new ideas at a coding level, it will also open your mind as an engineer and get you headed in a direction toward architecture and large scale application design.

An excellent book. A must have for any serious PHP developer.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Serious Stuff on PHP OOP, June 17, 2006

By 

David Stapleton (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: PHP 5 Objects, Patterns and Practice (Paperback)

I liked this book. It is probably the first I have run across that treats PHP as a serious development environment, addressing it to enterprise level tasks. That said, let me add a cautionary warning, this book is not for the novice to OOP.

Mr. Zandstra approaches his task by dividing the content into three sections: 1) Objects - covering various basic and advanced concepts in OOP as they apply to PHP, from polymorphism and encapsulation to abstracts, error handling and interfaces, 2) Patterns - using a few sources (including the 'Gang of Four') he covers composition, object generation, tasks and layers among other topics, 3) Practices - offering a little advice on how and why to use patterns and standards, as well as some coverage of PEAR, documenting and version control.

From a practical standpoint, I found the book interesting, but somewhat overwhelming. Let me try to clarify that a little. This book is targeted at enterprise level development, meaning serious business level coding/development. Most of my work in PHP so far, while it makes use of OOP, is relatively small scale (15-20 classes ranging from 200-1500 lines each in my most complex site). While I can see the logic in the patterns and practices that Zandstra writes about, the overall content is overkill for my scale of project. Now that isn't to say that I found the book useless, there are many of the concepts that the author discusses that will find their way into my design and code; I just won't be doing a wholesale pattern refactoring of my code (a viewpoint I get the feeling the author would agree with).

If you are a professional developer, I would recommend this book as a good read and part of your PHP reference library. If you are not an enterprise level developer and are just looking for sample code to help solve or implement solutions I would recommend PHP 5 Recipes (Apress).

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great introduction to object-oriented PHP, March 9, 2005

By 

Lasse Koskela (Helsinki, Finland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: PHP 5 Objects, Patterns and Practice (Paperback)

I haven't read a book on PHP in ages. In fact, I haven't programmed in PHP since 2001. With this in mind, I can say that Matt Zandstra's "PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice" was a very approachable introduction to what the latest version of the PHP platform has to offer to an OO developer from the Java scene.

The book is split to three main sections: objects, patterns, practice. The first section runs through the new object-oriented features of PHP 5, the second sections introduces design patterns and includes a catalog of some of the more common patterns from the original Gang of Four patterns as well as from "Core J2EE Patterns". The third section is a set of tutorials on tools and assets that a modern day PHP developer really should know about and make use of: the PEAR installation tool, PhpDocumentor, and the Phing build tool. The author also squeezed in a bit about the PHPUnit2 library for unit testing PHP code which I especially appreciated.

The design patterns catalog is far from comprehensive, covering only a small subset of published design patterns in the Java/.NET camps, but serves its purpose alright. Every included pattern is illustrated with an example that the author has crafted for the PHP context - in other words, these are not just direct ports from their Java equivalents, for example.

While being an easy read, Zandstra's introduction to the object-oriented features is, I believe, perfectly adequate to get started with object-oriented PHP programming. Combined with the discussion about design patterns, the book feels like a valuable asset for getting up to speed after a break. A more up-to-date PHP developer might find the information a bit lacking but for someone new to PHP 5's object-oriented features, this is a good package to get started with.