Ever wanted to post something for over a month and never found the time?
I recently read Matt Zandstra’s PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice and thought I’d say a few good words about it for those who haven’t been recommended yet. A lot of good PHP5 books have come out recently, eg something like PHP 5 Power Programming is an excellent resource for the finer points of charset issues, utf8 in PHP, timezone gotchas. But it’s quite unusual in PHP circles for a book to come out that gives overall sound advice on application design.
I found Matt, who comes from a Java background, really hit the nail on the head, this book is an enjoyable read. While the first few chapters make allowances for readers who don’t have a lot of exposure to OOP, the rest is quite a stimulating read, helped along in no small part by Matt’s excellent unambiguous writing style.
The book deals not only with all major components of a large application, but has a very nice section on the Composite pattern, and spends time looking at Phing, PEAR, and the Reflection API, among other things. The book finishes off with a parser project that brings together a lot of the concepts introduced in earlier chapters – I think even PHPers who consider themselves advanced will enjoy this. Matt apparently works for Yahoo in London.
July 12th, 2005 at 8:54 pm
Anyone else have recommendations for PHP 4 (mid-level) coders trying to learn more about PHP 5?
July 13th, 2005 at 1:08 am
I’m still waiting for the book to be delivered, but by the review I just read this should be just the book I’ve been looking for. Ever since PHP 5 came out I’ve been trying to find a new PHP…
July 13th, 2005 at 9:16 pm
I’ve had this book for a while and I always recommend that new employees at Fotopic read it. The theory is sound, and the practical implementations change the way most people program – for the better.
July 19th, 2005 at 7:00 pm
Why do books always waste space on the basics? Seems like every OO programming book I run across starts out with a chapter to introduce OO, then a few chapters to introduce you to the language itself, then they finally get to the point, about halfway through the book.
Is it just that authors feel like they have to stuff in this filler to justify the outrageous price of the books?
July 21st, 2005 at 8:50 pm
[Full disclosure: I tech reviewed this book and I work with the author]
The idea behind an introduction to OO was that for a lot of people moving to PHP5 the new focus on OO might be a spur for them to start using OO where they hadn’t before.
Remember that PHP is a procedural language first.
The book doesn’t have a language introduction though, except for OO specific usage, and mainly focussing on the new parts of PHP5. It’s definitely aimed at existing PHP users.
July 23rd, 2005 at 10:12 am
I haven’t been programming long, but this book has helped me immensely!
July 23rd, 2005 at 8:35 pm
Hi Tolan – thanks for writing in and congratulations to you + Matt on a great book. I kinda played down my review of the book at the last minute because i was surprised how all the Amazon reviews put it in a ‘beginner’ category. The truth is I thought the review of OOP practices and ideas introduced were both excellent and I found this work a head and shoulders above its voluminous peers.
August 19th, 2005 at 4:19 pm
Advanced PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle.
The book recently won ‘Best Development Book’ at the 2005 Linux Journal Editor’s Choice Awards and I highly recommend it.
http://www.schlossnagle.org/~george/blog/index.php?/archives/239-The-Book-Wins-an-Award!.html
September 30th, 2005 at 5:17 pm
While we’re on the subject of useful refactorings, I’d like to describe how using an Intercepting Filter helped round up and modularise software setup and initialisation tasks. Before the code could get down to business with the framework’s main task,
November 3rd, 2005 at 9:13 am
I figured that it really was about time I got my PHP blog off the ground. Although I don’t consider myself "up there" with such luminaries as Sklar, Zandstra, Alshanetsky or Shiflett, I have been coding in PHP for many years, and hope I can im
July 12th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
It’ s really great book!
December 15th, 2007 at 9:10 am
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