What is this book about?

With the release of PHP 5 and the Zend Engine 2, PHP finally graduates from it earliest days as a lightweight scripting syntax to an powerful object oriented programming language that can hold its own against the Java and .NET architectures that currently dominate corporate software development. This book has a pragmatic focus on how to use PHP in the larger scheme of enterprise-class software development.

What does this book cover?

Unlike Java or .NET, there is little discussion of the application of design patterns, component architectures, and best-practices to the development of applications using PHP. Software written in the absence of this sort of higher-order architecture will never be able to match the robust frameworks that Java and .NET ship with out of the box. This book addresses this issue by covering the following material: 

• Part 1 discusses the OO concepts that were initially explored in Beginning PHP 5 and a demonstration of how to implement them in PHP 5. This section also covers UML modeling and provides a brief introduction to project management techniques that are covered in more depth in Part 4.
• Parts 2 and 3 present objects and object hierarchies that, when completed, comprise a robust toolkit that developers will be able to reuse on future projects. These chapters are designed to arm the professional PHP developer with the sort of constructs that are available out of the box with platforms such as Java and .NET — from simple utility classes like Collection and Iterator, to more complex constructs like Model/View/Controller architectures and state machines.
• Part 4 shows how to use the toolkit from Parts 2 and 3 to create real-world applications. We look at the development of a robust contact management system that will leverage the componentry and concepts already discussed and introduce project management and software architecture concepts that enable developers to accurately identify business requirements, design scalable, extensible platforms, and handle change management effectively. It covers the waterfall and spiral project management paradigms and include a discussion on eXtreme Programming and other approaches to software development.
• The Appendices include an extended discussion on the effective use of CVS, introduce the Zend Studio IDE and related tools, and discuss performance tuning and scalability.

What is this book about? With the release of PHP 5 and the Zend Engine 2, PHP finally graduates from it earliest days as a lightweight scripting syntax to an powerful object oriented programming language that can hold its own against the Java and .NET architectures that currently dominate corporate software development. This book has a pragmatic focus on how to use PHP in the larger scheme of enterprise-class software development. What does this book cover? Unlike Java or .NET, there is little discussion of the application of design patterns, component architectures, and best-practices to the development of applications using PHP. Software written in the absence of this sort of higher-order architecture will never be able to match the robust frameworks that Java and .NET ship with out of the box. This book addresses this issue by covering the following material: Part 1 discusses the OO concepts that were initially explored in Beginning PHP 5 and a demonstration of how to implement them in PHP 5. This section also covers UML modeling and provides a brief introduction to project management techniques that are covered in more depth in Part 4. Parts 2 and 3 present objects and object hierarchies that, when completed, comprise a robust toolkit that developers will be able to reuse on future projects. These chapters are designed to arm the professional PHP developer with the sort of constructs that are available out of the box with platforms such as Java and .NET -; from simple utility classes like Collection and Iterator, to more complex constructs like Model/View/Controller architectures and state machines. Part 4 shows how to use the toolkit from Parts 2 and 3 to create real-world applications. We look at the development of a robust contact management system that will leverage the componentry and concepts already discussed and introduce project management and software architecture concepts that enable developers to accurately identify business requirements, design scalable, extensible platforms, and handle change management effectively. It covers the waterfall and spiral project management paradigms and include a discussion on eXtreme Programming and other approaches to software development. The Appendices include an extended discussion on the effective use of CVS, introduce the Zend Studio IDE and related tools, and discuss performance tuning and scalability.

What is this book about?

With the release of PHP 5 and the Zend Engine 2, PHP finally graduates from it earliest days as a lightweight scripting syntax to an powerful object oriented programming language that can hold its own against the Java and .NET architectures that currently dominate corporate software development. This book has a pragmatic focus on how to use PHP in the larger scheme of enterprise-class software development.

What does this book cover?

Unlike Java or .NET, there is little discussion of the application of design patterns, component architectures, and best-practices to the development of applications using PHP. Software written in the absence of this sort of higher-order architecture will never be able to match the robust frameworks that Java and .NET ship with out of the box. This book addresses this issue by covering the following material: 

• Part 1 discusses the OO concepts that were initially explored in Beginning PHP 5 and a demonstration of how to implement them in PHP 5. This section also covers UML modeling and provides a brief introduction to project management techniques that are covered in more depth in Part 4.
• Parts 2 and 3 present objects and object hierarchies that, when completed, comprise a robust toolkit that developers will be able to reuse on future projects. These chapters are designed to arm the professional PHP developer with the sort of constructs that are available out of the box with platforms such as Java and .NET — from simple utility classes like Collection and Iterator, to more complex constructs like Model/View/Controller architectures and state machines.
• Part 4 shows how to use the toolkit from Parts 2 and 3 to create real-world applications. We look at the development of a robust contact management system that will leverage the componentry and concepts already discussed and introduce project management and software architecture concepts that enable developers to accurately identify business requirements, design scalable, extensible platforms, and handle change management effectively. It covers the waterfall and spiral project management paradigms and include a discussion on eXtreme Programming and other approaches to software development.
• The Appendices include an extended discussion on the effective use of CVS, introduce the Zend Studio IDE and related tools, and discuss performance tuning and scalability.

Needed to be reviewed.
This book would have a lot of potential if only it had been edited properly. There are simply too many inconsistencies and outright mistakes for me to give this book a good review. The concepts are nice, and ideas good, and the wording easy to read. Problem is, I don’t feel I can trust any of the examples, and I learn by example. It doesn’t feel like the authors bothered to read their own book.

For Intermediate Developers with Intelligence
This book is great for experienced developers looking for some ideas in how you can use PHP to implement your application designs.

There are some obvious mistakes and bad design choices in the book, but most intelligent developers will spot these.

The last part of the book is an end-to-end review of a PHP5 life cycle, and it’s pretty worthless if you’re at all a postmodern developer.

This book is good for some programming ideas and for scratching the surface of how to design good PHP5 web applications.

Great breadth, questionable concepts
I gave it 3 stars for the inspiration that the discussion of a great breadth of PHP/OOP topics provides. There’s everything from design techniques to coding practices to project management. Unfortunately, the treatment of most topics is somewhat cursory and many of the code examples are either not thought out carefully or don’t work. Thus the code, although it takes up a substantial part of the book, has to be seen as illustration material only. Some of the concepts I found confusing. For example, I am not quite able to understand the purpose of a collection class (chapter 5), given PHP’s dynamical typing and associative arrays. Furthermore, the MVC model (chapter 13) is introduced as having a fourth "infrastructure" component. I am not sure what architecture model this would constitute, but it is probably not an MVC model. There are many such quirks in ths book. Programmers who are interested in advanced OOP concepts will find this book to be a good overview of methodical -as opposed to ad hoc- software construction with PHP. In order to actually learn and apply these techniques, a more thorough introduction to object-oriented theory and design is probably required.

Excellent!
I have been a PHP programmer for several years now, and this book just took things to a new level for me. It inspired me to build more scalable and secure applications and to become a better programmer. Though this book is about Object Oriented PHP, it also covers things like Project Management, templating, and specific Design Patterns.

This book is chock full of great code examples - real world examples. The authors have a great writing style that makes this book an easy read without getting bored or lost.

If you are looking to become a professional PHP programmer, this book is a must read. It allows you to get a better grasp of OOP and its patterns and approaches.

Excellent and Practical PHP programming practice guide
I think I have to agree with the lead Author’s comment to address the concern of some reviewers. If you are good in your PHP4 skills and want to take it to the next level (very similar to practices followed by companies employing large-scale PHP based application development), then I believe, this would be an awesome book!

A lot of concepts shared by the Authors would be in parallel with George Schlossnagle’s Advanced PHP Programming topics. Both are assets to aspiring PHP programmers who want to understand and architect better PHP based applications.

Regarding some code errors that some reviewers have pointed out..i would recommend the reader to stick to the underlying concept the program emphasizes rather than the syntax [Frankly, I have not executed any code from the book..but to say the least..the coding practice appears to be good]. The key is to grab the design concept and methodologies behind building robust web applications.

Interesting points of view but....
Although errors can seem obvious in some situations, some are not so obvious when the prose describe what is desired, but the code samples provided do not fit the bill. Expect to spend some time determining if the code actually does what is described. Download the code samples from the Wrox site and try it for yourself first (start with ch15 for a good example of ample carelessness). Inconsistent conventions used throughout the book (naming private members of a class for example) also make it more challenging to follow the code samples. There is also a large portion of the book dedicated to non-php-specific Coding House approaches to business. Although several sections provide decent and accurate coverage, the book fails to provide a flow to the next section in most cases. While reading, it is apparent when you have switched to a new author (since they do not follow the best practices presented earlier in the narrative). If a proper review for errors and some rewriting to tie the sections together were performed, this book could improve, however, I cannot recommend it as is. If you are not bothered when you skim the table of contents and spot page numbers (chapter 25) being misnumbered, then perhaps the various other errors throughout the book can be overlooked. I would accept such errors in an online book under review - not from an established publishing house.

Buyer Beware
I like the topics covered in this book. However, there are a number of grammatical errors throughout and the codes in the book are full of errors. If you’re up for the challenge of surfing the books forum page at [...] to find code fixes, then this book is for you. But, if your not the adventurous type and like codes to work out of the box then this book isn’t for you.

Missing information / Many examples don’t work
This is obviously a book written by a collective of PHP4 programmers who have taken code that they’ve written and are familiar with (and which is sometimes outdated), and attempted to put a Object Oriented face on it in order to make a little money from this book.

Notice that if you’re looking for a comprehensive PHP5 book, this is not it. The authors don’t even mention the new MySQLi extension for PHP5 nor the SQLite database. It’s obvious they come from and are still in the pre-PHP5 world. They also are slanted towards Smarty page templates and using Postgres for their examples. They give only a passing mention (one page, three sentences) to MySQL.

If you do buy this book, be prepared to go to www.wrox.com and the forums to find corrections to the code examples made by readers. Be prepared to re-write many of their examples.

All in all, this might be a generally useful book, but be advised that the grammatical errors, code mistakes, and parochial attitudes don’t make it the best.

Object Oriented PHP
I agree that this book must have been rushed through development considering all the typographical errors, but I also agree that most of them are obvious and easy to overlook. I also agree that all the examples are written for PostgreSQL. I use both PostgreSQL and MySQL, so I don’t have a problem with converting the code to use the new PHP mysqli functions. Other than quoting field names, there aren’t many differences between PostgreSQL syntax and MySQL syntax. What this book does is start from chapter 1 showing you how to use Object Oriented Programming with PHP, and it does an excellent job of carefully covering each step so that you have a solid foundation to move to the next chapter. I love this book! Even with a mistake in the code on the errata page, it still rocks. Wrox books are the best!

Excellent Resource
I have been programming PHP for the past 5 years now, and have read many other books on programming PHP. This book tops the list. Most other books stick to the procedural programming, but this aspect of OOP and the examples were excellent.

I havent had a chance to test the actual code (I wanted to read completely through the book first and then go back with the examples). However, I am already using the new approaches in my current job and its making things much easier. I especially loved the chapters on project management and testing.

This book gets an all around 5 stars for being so thorough on so many aspects.

Great work!

The best php5 book
First, I have to disagree strongly with the last reviewer. Every php5 book I have encountered has some errors in the code, but this one actually has the *least*. The php5 engine was being developed at the time of all these books and there were many changes. Anyone who can’t correct the occasional non-working line of code shouldn’t be reading this anyway.

I have been through all the new php5 pro books and this one is the better. Most of the other books have a tedious approach and the chapters don’t build on one another. Here there is a gradual approach of both theoretical and practice.

Ready to become a pro - Try the code before you buy
First, visit wrox dot com and download the sample code that is available for free on their site.

If you think you want this book, you probably already have php5/Apache/mySQL installed on your development workstation.

Unzip the sample code, browse it using your favorite IDE. Note the usage of PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. Take a shot at executing the very simple OO sample files in the first chapter. Notice the syntax errors, the use of depracated functions, and errors in filenaming.

This book was rushed through development, much like most poorly developed applications. Very much a shame. I bought the book based off of previous Amazon reviews but failed to visit the user forum on the wrox site.

You’ll notice there that the topic of greatest interest for this book is that of disappointment in it’s development. In print for most of this year and not a single errata to correct the carelessness of the authors’ inattention to detail.

0 stars for typos.
0 stars for poor sample code.
0 stars for the editors.
1 star for providing great general reference in the non-code oriented chapters.
1 star for giving me the chance to fix the errors in sample code and offering it up to wrox in exchange for refund of this purchase.

Be warned. This is a great reference book, the code is bukaki.

Excellent resource to improve as a PHP programmer.
Most of the people in who write php know that it’s a very informal language in terms of quality. It’s easy to get something done -- that’s it’s appeal -- but because of that it’s also easy to write poorly written code.

This book teaches methods and concepts. When I picked it up I was expecting to learn about the features of php 5 but by the time I finished it I felt like I had gotten better as a developer. Alot of the general concepts of well written software are adapted here for PHP. So you learn not only what you can do with the language, but also how you should do correctly.

If you care about the quality of your code and write PHP get this book.

A must read for all PHP Programmers
This book is just what the PHP community needs. I come from a strong C++ background, and I have struggled with the huge amounts of poorly written PHP code out there. The PHP community needs to step up and become professional, and this book is a must read for anyone that wans to create solid software. This book touches on the most important aspects of high level software design using PHP. It also provides some usefule code and examples to help illustrate the benefits of proper Object Oriented design.