PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice, Second Edition

Backed by a tireless development community, PHP has been a model of language evolution over its 10+ year history. Borne from a contract developer?s pet project, these days you?ll find PHP powering many of the world?s largest web sites, including Yahoo!, Digg, EA Games, and Lycos.

PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice, Second Edition shows you how to meld the power of PHP with the sound enterprise development techniques embraced by professional programmers. Going well beyond the basics of object?oriented development, you?ll learn about advanced topics such as working with static methods and properties, abstract classes, interfaces, design patterns, exception handling, and more. You?ll also be exposed to key tools such as PEAR, CVS, Phing, and phpDocumentor.

What you?ll learn Write solid, maintainable code by embracing object?oriented techniques and design patterns. Create detailed, versatile documentation using the powerful phpDocumentor automated documentation system. Gain new flexibility during the development process by managing your code within a CVS repository and using the Phing build system. Capitalize upon the quality code of others by using the PEAR package management solution. Who is this book for?

PHP developers seeking to embrace sound development techniques such as object?orientation, design patterns, testing, and documentation

User review
Excellent Book For Advanced PHP
This is a very advanced book on PHP. It assumes a solid understanding of object-oriented PHP programming, although it does offer a basic review of OOP practices. The discussion on patterns is in-depth and explanatory but the pace of this book is very fast. Be sure to follow along and do the exercises on your own server or it won't sink in as well. I'd also suggest a study-group with others studying fromt he same book, as if it were a college CS class.

User review
One of the few solid professional PHP books.
One of the only truly professional PHP books out on the market that we recommend at Sevenforty [,,.] to other developers. Most PHP books are written by authors with very little professional development experience and are filled with horrific coding practices and bad `cut and paste` examples. Matt's book breaks that mold with solid object-oriented examples, logical explanations, plenty of design pattern examples and shows PHP right at home with the MVC design pattern.

This book is not for folks just starting out in programming. It takes a prior understanding of how design patterns fit into professional web development. However, for those developers who want to make the transition from amateur PHP coder to professional, enterprise level PHP developer, this book is the starting point.

User review
4.5 stars really, but overall a very good investment
It's been about a year and a half since I've read this book, I have the first edition, but I think most of what I write is still relevant for this second one.

This book deserves 4.5 stars, but I could enter either 4 or 5. I'm giving it 5 because at the moment, very few php books come close in trying to actually present the language as a real contender for serious and professional web development. This book might change the mind of many who've always thought of php as a hobbyist language.

PHP has come a long way since its inception, but the teaching material has not really caught up and the community is still pestered with bad code, architecture and practice. This book is an eye opener as it presents php for what it can be: a convenient and flexible tool that, in the right hands, can tough up and do great things. After this you might seriously question your decision to go Java. It's not to say that php can do everything, but before you move away, you should definitely understand why. The book has 3 parts:

The object section is a nice introduction to the goodies in the new php5 object model. As a matter of fact, the entire book is php5 centric, which to me is a plus. You'll learn about such things as the __call, __get and __set `magic` methods, the __toString method, the Reflection API, just to name a few. By the end of this section, you should have a clear idea why it might be good to let php4 rest. One thing sorely missing though, is an intro to the SPL.

The Pattern section is probably the bulk of the book. It's a nice attempt at bringing some java into your php coffee. An intro to the world of design patterns as they can be applied to php. You'll learn about different `enterprise` patterns (there's that java buzzword), to help you better structure and organize your code. If you've heard of such things as Singleton, Observer, Registry, Controller, MVC and are still scratching your head, this might be a good investment.

The Practice section was a bit of a let down. If the author cares for some suggestions:
- forget CVS: there are currently two popular and very good open source version control libraries, SVN and Git. Git being slightly more complex to understand, but in terms of performance and usefulness, in a class of its own.
- forget PEAR: instead have a chapter on frameworks, or maybe particularly about the Zend Framework, which is as close an approach you can get to modular object oriented libraries. ZF embodies exactly what this book tries to preach and is completely written in PHP5. I think it is the perfect candidate to replace PEAR in that section of the book.

Just my 0.02$.


User review
Buen libro de POO y PHP (Good OOP PHP book)
Explica con palabras sencillas los conceptos de programacion orientada a objetos (POO) y como aplicarlos en PHP, sin embargo pienso que el autor aveces se extiende demasiado para explicar sus ideas y no concreta del todo. El libro es ideal para unir el concepto de POO y PHP, mas no para aplicarlo, no es un libro para ejercitar.

Explains in simple words the concepts of object oriented programming (OOP) and how to apply them in PHP, however I think that he sometimes stretches too much to explain his ideas and not specific at all. The book is ideal for combining the concept of OOP and PHP, but not to implement it, is not a book for exercise.

User review
Interesting and easy to read PHP OO primer
I have experience in a variety of object oriented (OO) languages, but not PHP. This book has helped me understand how PHP supports objects and some of the typical design patterns you will see in OO PHP.
Although it is written with PPH5, it even covers some aspects of OO in PHP4.
It is easy to read, interesting and contains good code examples.
This isn't a PHP Beginners book, although I'm not fully familiar with PHP and haven't had a hard time reading this book, probably because of my OO background and basic PHP knowledge. Still, if you just need a PHP beginners book, this isn't the one.
It is a great book if you want to learn OO PHP or even just some OO principles in general. Very glad I picked this book up.