PHP in Action: Objects, Design, Agility (Paperback)

by Dagfinn Reiersol (Author), Marcus Baker (Author), Chris Shiflett (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
To keep programming productive and enjoyable, state-of-the-art practices and principles are essential. Object-oriented programming and design help manage complexity by keeping components cleanly separated. Unit testing helps prevent endless, exhausting debugging sessions. Refactoring keeps code supple and readable. PHP offers all this-and more.

This book shows you how to apply PHP techniques and principles to all the most common challenges of web programming, including:

Web presentation and templates

User interaction including the Model-View-Contoller architecture

Input validation and form handling

Database connection and querying and abstraction

Object persistence

About the Author
Dagfinn Reiersol has been designing and developing web applications, web content mining software, web programming tools, and text analysis programs, mostly in PHP, since 1997. He also has a long history as a technical writer of software manuals. He lives in Oslo, Norway.

Marcus Baker has been a software consultant for many years specializing in OO design and development as well as web application development and testing. He is also a columnist for PHP "Architecture Magazine" and lives in London, England.

Chris Shiflett is a PHP consultant and security expert as well as a leader in the PHP community. He is the founder of the PHP Security Consortium and the author of the HTTP Developer's Handbook (Sams) and Essential PHP Security (O'Reilly). He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Product Details

• Paperback: 552 pages
• Publisher: Manning Publications; illustrated edition edition (July 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932394753
• ISBN-13: 978-1932394757
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #64,734 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars best of the best, October 6, 2007

By	M. Coughlin "Mike" (Westerly, RI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Most books, I've read are written by full-time authors, rather than contractors (i.e. practitioners) ... and it shows ... in the "hello world", foo-bar examples ... for lack of immagination. This author has, clearly, been developing websites - for years; it's so evident throughout. Moreover, the author is VERY well read and aware of the latest development theories, practices, principles and design patterns. He writes with the wisdom of someone who has lived through long wars of website development and, more importantly to the reader, has found most practical ways to weave current design theory into guidelines for getting things done with PHP.

How many books have you finished and asked yourself, "ok, now, where do I start?". This is NOT one of those books. This, more than any other, answers the "How ...?" providing a whole process for starting, being sure of incremental progress, handling inevitable complexity and, ultimately, maintainability.

I've read over a dozen PHP books, usually picked based on Amazon recommendations (when available). This book stands head and shoulders ABOVE ANYthing I've found to date ... for its pragmatic blend of theory and practice. On a scale of 1 to 5 stars, this is at least an 11 (or better)! If you don't study this book, CAREFULLY, you're in for far more miserable coding experiences than necessary.

When I took the scenic boat ride through Oslo harbor, I had no idea that such a blend of PHP techniques and advanced coding theory was evolving in Norway! <G> It's such a beautiful ride ... try it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars PHP In Action, December 7, 2007

By	Sam J. Keen (Portland, OR US) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is geared toward the intermediate PHP developer who wants to bring in aspects of OOP, Testing and Refactoring to help improve the quality of the code they write. It is split into four parts; Basic Tools and Concepts, Testing and Refactoring, Building the Web Interface, and Databases and Infrastructure.

In addition to PHP, I have decent amount of experience with Java and Java web frameworks such as Struts. So as I worked through this book much of the content was familiar to me but from a Java perspective. It was enlightening to see the authors express these same concepts from a PHP perspective. The fact that many times (not always), the implementation in PHP is more concise and elegant that the Java alternative really shows of the power of a dynamically typed language such as PHP. Also the fact that PHP was bred from the beginning to be a web development language gives it a definate advantage in the web arena.
The authors are honest though, they haven't simply painted implementing OO, TDD, and Refactoring as completelty painless. For instance in the testing portion they've devoted quite a bit of time to showing the difficulties of testing (especially in a Web environment). Such as the need for mock objects and the difficulty in keeping mocks "real enough" so they fail and pass as the real object would. This full disclosure is key for readers to estimate if the extra effort of a concept is worth the benefits for their particual situation.

Overall this is great book for the intended audience. It is not "black and white" about the solutions it proposes. Reasonable alternatives are given and the pros and cons of each are expressed. For those with extensive OO experience, some portions of the book may seem trivial but overall it is still worth a "quick scan" to see the specifics of PHP implementations of general OO concepts.
PHP in Action: Objects, Design, Agility

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good read overall, with lots of information for intermediate developers, October 22, 2007

By	Trent Buckingham - See all my reviews

One thing I liked in this book is that it has lots of information for experienced web developers who are moving from a bigger framework (like .Net, Rails, or even Java) to PHP. It contains good practices for performing "framework-type" activities like database and HTTP request encapsulation. The chapters on controllers tells you how emulate MVC-like components in PHP.

The only problem I have with it is how the chapter intros were written. They read like page fillers that just break the smooth flow of the whole text. Most of them are personal experiences by the author(s) that were forcefully fitted to introduce a certain programming topic or issue. The thing is it just doesn't work.