View Larger Image	Matt Zandstra Apress, Paperback, 2nd edition, Published December 2007, 512 pages, ISBN 1590599098
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Read an excerpt: Chapter 1: PHP - Design and Management       Excerpt provided courtesy of Apress. Copyright © Apress, Inc. Written permission from the publisher is required for any use of this material.

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• Other Topics : Open Source
• Web Design/Development : PHP
• Web Design/Development : Web Development

• Apress

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

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.

Feb 22, 2008     Jonathon Hibbard (jhibbard@gmail.com) from HSR Business to Business
Great Book!
I've personally read about 100+ IT-related books, ranging from Certification Crams, Networking, Programming, and even computer repair. Ive developed with PHP for almost 7 years now, having over 10 years of development language experience overall with other languages. What I'm about to say may surprise some, some may even find it hard to believe, and even more will absolutely disregard it as truth. On the flip side, what I am about to say may intrigue you, have you yearning to learn more, or even have you ready to go buy the book at this very moment. Either way that's your opinion, your thoughts and ultimately your decision. I'm simply telling it how it is, while being as truthful as I possibly can be. PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice is by far, the most thought out, well planned and pleasant books I've read on any subject, period. Most technical books leave you feeling like the author was some sort of robot from Mars, sent to Earth intent upon teaching humans how to write code. This book takes a totally different approach, an approach that I could only dream of taking to explain advanced concepts that Mr. Zandstra explains. The book begins with giving the reader a "blast to the past" look at how PHP started out, how it evolved and what we should be expecting to see in the future. It explains how OOP came into being, how it became much more than the author's could ever dream, and how it eventually became the selling point for PHP. After giving you a brief history lesson, it finally starts into the actual technical sections. Once again, they follow the idea of showing the reader where PHP went wrong, and then finally how they made up for it by doing it the way it was supposed to have been done. The first three chapters explain the above in extreme and perfect detail. The following chapters begin your development cycle by first bringing the reader up to speed on OOP basics followed by advanced topics that help mold your mind around working in PHP's brand new OOP environment. The chapters after basically keep building on top of that foundation, zeroing in on trouble areas followed by intelligent solutions to each problem. Every single page I read, I learned something new. Every single exercise, I said to myself, wow...I can't believe I've made it this far without knowing this. What makes this book so appealing to me is that it's not meant for the newbie as almost every book you find at Barnes and Nobel will be. Instead, its directed at the seasonal developer, the developer who has already been coding in PHP for 4+ years, developed long enough to know what PHP can and cannot do. Its also for the developer who has longed for a book that gives us incentive for moving to 5 and away from our trusty stable PHP 4 release. Matt uses such an impressive means of explaining how things work, that I probably have learned more in this 470 page book (yes, I even read the Appendixes, which is an honest-to-God first for me) than I've learned in any 1000+ page book. Every time I met a new chapter, I found myself ready to open the trusty laptop and try it out instead of skipping about 10 chapters to finally get to a place that actually covered something meaningful. Matt Zandstra, my hat is off to you. This book was everything I have been looking for in a PHP book.

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