Product Description

PHP 5's object-oriented enhancements are among the most significant improvements in the 10+ year history of the language. This book introduces you to those new features and the many opportunities they provide, as well as a number of tools that will help you maximize development efforts.

The book begins with a broad overview of PHP 5's object-oriented features, introducing key topics like class declaration, object instantiation, inheritance, and method and property encapsulation. You'll also learn about advanced topics including static methods and properties, abstract classes, interfaces, exception handling, object cloning, and more. You'll also benefit from an extensive discussion regarding object-oriented design best practices.

The next part of the book is devoted to a topic that is often a natural extension of any object-oriented introduction: design patterns. PHP 5 is particularly well-suited to the deployment of these solutions for commonly occurring programming problems. The author will introduce pattern concepts and show you how to implement several key patterns in your PHP applications.

The last segment introduces a number of great utilities that help you document, manage, test, and build your PHP applications, including Phing, PHPUnit2, phpDocumentor, PEAR, and CVS.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #242411 in Books
• Published on: 2004-12-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 438 pages

About the Author
Matt Zandstra has worked as a Web programmer, consultant and writer for a decade. He has been an object evangelist for most of that time. Matt is the author of SAMS Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours (three editions), and contributed to DHTML Unleashed. He has written articles for Linux Magazine and Zend.com. Matt works primarily with PHP, Perl and Java, building online applications. He is an engineer at Yahoo! in London.

Matt lives in Brighton with his wife Louise, and two children, Holly and Jake. Because it has been so long since he has had any spare time he only distantly recollects that he runs regularly to offset the effects of his liking for pubs and cafes, and for sitting around reading and writing fiction. Learn more on Matt's website, getInstance.

Customer Reviews

gr8 book for php5 concepts
Its probably one of the best books for understanding php5 concepts. It describes each and every feature of php5 with appropriate examples and is quite easy to comprehend.

Little about quickly using design patterns in practice
The book gives an excellent introduction in object oriented programming (OOP), even when you want to learn OOP without using PHP. They first describe a clear problem and then show why and how OOP can be used to create a better solution.
(Note that I already had OOP Java knowledge before reading the book.)

The second part of the book focuses on Design Patterns, which I sometimes found not clearly explained; problems unclear and definitions not explained. The OOP part was clearer.

The last part focuses on external tools to ease php programming, like testing, documenting, automatic deploying etc.

A major problem about the book is that it focuses a lot on OOP and design patterns without simply showing how this can be directly applied on a webpage or website. The end of part II feels more like how to make a complete PHP Enterprise framework from scratch yourself, with a lot of details making it a bit hard to crasp. It will take a lot of (initial) effort if you want to apply the enterprise patterns described in this book. In a real project, you probably won't even make a complete framework like this yourself, but take an existing framework like CakePHP of Zend Framework, something where the book doesn't talk about....

Buy both of them!
This book does borrow heavily from the "Gang of Four" book as other reviewers have mentioned. But the latter is the definative book on Design Patterns.

I would recommend buying both books as they do complement each other quite well. The examples in "PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice" tended be be a bit obscure but were clear and practical.

I recommend this book.