Customer Reviews

Professional PHP Design Patterns (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

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

 

 

This book was just what I needed to get a grasp on the design patterns and learn how to use them correctly. The examples are small enough to wrap my head around but big enough to get the idea of what is going on. I would recomend this to anyone that is a php programmer working wiht objects.

I have had the book for only 2 days and I already used the facade and the decorator pattern in a project. Just after I got the code installed on the website the owner changed his mind and requested some code changes. I found that it was much easier to manage his changes since I used the design patterns shown in this book. Actually it was almost a pleasure to make the changes to the code since it was set up properly in the first place.

I am not even half way through this book (am still working through the rest of the Patterns reference, haven't looked at the last three chapters) and am already kicking myself for not discovering this book sooner. My project that I am currently working on would have benefited greatly from some of the patterns in this book.

Every pattern has a simple, real life example of a problem and a simple solution. One of the things you have to realize about this book is that the patterns are not plug-and-play. You can't just insert the patterns into your project without modifying them; they have to be tailored to fit your project. Luckily, the pattern examples are clear enough that that shouldn't be a problem in most circumstances. I would recommend this book if you want to better organize your code and improve its scalability.

Also, I initially did not realize that there were a few chapters at the end of the book regarding implementing the patterns. The author talks about planning a project using Patterns, and then in another chapter builds the project. I will probably read over these chapters, as I would assume they are good examples of the patterns in action. When I originally wrote this review, I gave the product 5 stars BEFORE I realized these final chapters existed. I was pleasantly surprised by just the reference material. These final chapters are an added bonus in my book.

First, sorry for mistakes, I'm from Italy so I will be very concise.
The problems of this book are:
- examples for each pattern: only one example and very very very ... too simple! examples in design pattern are very important - for me - , I think that a usefull book on patterns should present four or five examples for each pattern, at least.

- not all patterns are treated! What about "Chain of Responsability"? And "Abstract Factory"? And "Bridge"? And "composite" ? And "Flyweight"? This book has only 238 page, and you treat about pattern from 26 to 125 ... I think this is not enought.

This book has some pretty big errors and it's really vague with each design pattern. However it did help me understand PHP design patterns better.

I would recommend the head first of design patterns elements book. Since they use Java examples I would recommend to have your text editor open and "translate" the Java to PHP. I think that would really help to understand OO and design patterns better versus just reading the book and looking at Java examples.