PHP 5 Power Programming (Bruce Perens Open Source)

Ajax in Action

PHP 5 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Problem-Solution Approach)

Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional

Advanced PHP Programming

Php Books

PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice

Format: Paperback
Author: Matt Zandstra
ReleaseDate: 21 December, 2004
Publisher: Apress
Rating:

Pretty good book
However, I did like this book. I'm already reasonably educated on basic patterns. It was a good read. I'd highly suggest it for anyone writing PHP and needs to grasp OO development.

However, I was expecting a little bit more in the "Practice" section of this book. I was expecting a few more real world examples to show how the author would use patterns or even Object Oriented PHP in a real world application.

Since there are so few well designed OO PHP projects out there, I was hoping to see something that was specifically OO (as OO as PHP can be anyway) practice. . . A quick form based multi-page site would have been nice. While that may sound like a lot, it shouldn't take more than 1 chapter (about 30 pages) to show the code and briefly go over it.

So, all-in-all, this book is a great tutorial on PHP OO design. What it lacked (for me anyway), was real world examples of good OO design.

Serious Stuff on PHP OOP
It is probably the first I have run across that treats PHP as a serious development environment, addressing it to enterprise level tasks. I liked this book. 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).

Super clear explanation of OOP
This is one of the most clear introduction to all aspects of object design programming I saw so far for a programming language. If you are a programmer of any language that supports Objects, this book is for you. 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!.