PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice

This was the exact right book at the right time for me. I have been managing a php software project for the past 5 years and it's growing harder to deal with. I had started to make some haphazard use of design patterns, cvs, and pear already. It's hard to find time away from daily business pressures to improve one's practices, but this book brought together some very useful techniques and tools in a concise way. I've read patterns books for other languages, but having the examples in php with special attention to php 5's oo improvements made this one much more useful and quicker to absorb for me.

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).

If you are a programmer of any language that supports Objects, this book is for you. This is one of the most clear introduction to all aspects of object design programming I saw so far for a programming language. This is not a "cookbook" with Php recipes, it is a really well written guide to proper software architecture design with Php. So good that you'll find useful also for other languages. Almost all advanced topics regarding Php5 are also covered. Really useful the practices section. PHP developers: please READ! You know, Data Types actually exist! A must have!

I got this book thinking, "Hey, this might help me get a leg up on that new PHP 5 OOP stuff." That it did. However, this book accomplishes much more than that. Zandstra sets himself a several goals and meets them all quite well. These include: providing an understanding of classes, objects, and interfaces in PHP 5; presenting a numbers of useful design patterns as expressed in PHP 5 terms; giving the reader information about and insight into advanced development tools and methodologies for large-scale PHP 5 projects. A particularly valuable service provided by the author lies in the fact that there is a real dearth of material on design patterns for PHP developers, most of the literature on this subject being written with the assumption that the reader is highly proficient in Java or C++ (or possibly Smalltalk). This is all well and good if your background includes lots of work or study in one or more of these; however, for many Web developers, PHP is the primary and sometimes only programming language (and for many more, their only previous experience is with other scripting languages such as Perl, Python, JavaScript, VBScript, etc.). Zandstra goes to the effort of translating many of the classic "Gang of Four" design patterns into PHP 5 code and thereby makes accessible a realm that was heretofore unknown to many PHP developers. If this were all that the book covered, it would be useful in and of itself for this alone. But the author also gives us a good, thorough grounding in both the mechanics of PHP 5's new object model and (especially important!) the rationale behind it. He also provides a nice tutorial on UML modeling along the way, and finishes up with a look at some current development tools like Phing and CVS. There are plenty of helpful and useful examples along the way. I give this book 5 stars for having really helped me wrap my head round some advanced OO programming and design concepts. I've already got loads of use from it; my copy is about two months old, and it's already getting dog-eared. It's also a very enjoyable read, and a real cut above most of the "How To Program In ..." sorts of books. This is the perfect book for someone with some experience with writing PHP code who's looking to move up to the next level - creating real, scalable, enterprise-level PHP applications.

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.