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Title: Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More

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Title

Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More

Category

PHP books

Author

Kevin McArthur

Publisher

Apress

Release date

March 24, 2008

ISBN

1590598199

Sales ranking

Week: Not ranked All time: 90

Reviews

May 19, 2009
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Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More reviewed by
Picture of Marcelo Santos Araujo
Marcelo Santos Araujo
crosaratech.com.br
If you really want to improve your PHP skills to be at the enterprise level, you must read this book.

Despite there are several other PHP books about OOP, I have never seen a book that addresses the subject so deeply and, at the same time, keeping it simple.

In chapter 1, it presents abstract classes, interfaces and "programming by contract", which is a great introduction before going in depth in other more advanced chapters.

Despite the fact these design patterns are described in chapter 2, the focus of the book is not really to explain every common design pattern that is nowadays in use.

After that, it provides a great overview on exceptions handling, which is really helpful, even for experienced PHP developers, and in particular to developers that are studying for the Zend certification exam.

The book ends part 1 with the new PHP 6 features, despite PHP 6 has not been released yet.

Part 2 addresses several of the latest hot topics in software development, such as documentation and coding convention, reflection (which really useful for developing MVC frameworks) and the most interesting topic in my opinion which is testing, deployment and continuous integration.

In chapter 8, as I have mentioned above, I do not know any other PHP book that talks about the continuous integration approach. It describes the Xinc continuous integration server, the Phing deployment tool, the PHPUnit unit testing framework and XDebug.

The only important tool that I miss in this part of the book is PHPUnderControl. which was probably not yet released when this book was published, or for any other reason the author decided to not cover it.

The explanations about the Standard PHP Library can be found in part 3. It is all about SPL and its related topics: iterators, file and directory handling, array overloading and exceptions.

At the end the book, part 4 describes how a real MVC framework works. It also explains how to implement your own MVC framework.

Chapters 15, 16 and 17 provide a good tutorial about the Zend Framework. It talks about several important aspects about this framework such as: layout management, caching, configuration files, action helpers, view helpers, error handling, object sharing.

To make this book more complete, the last part presents several techniques when aspects related with the use of AJAX and Web services, such as using JSON with PHP or Javascript, SOAP and the implementation of advanced Web services, except for RESTful services.

{buttons}If you consider yourself a serious PHP developer and you would like to learn about the latest trends in PHP Web development, do not hesitate to purchase this book. It provides great overviews in many fields, addressing all the latest techniques and approaches to deliver great PHP applications.

It is indeed a great book that brings the PHP developer to a next level, describing all the current PHP hot topics, such as SPL, advanced object oriented programming techniques, unit testing, continuous integration, code documentation, PHP 6 features, the Standard PHP Library (SPL), MVC architecture among others.

If you consider yourself a serious PHP developer and you would like to learn about the latest trends in PHP Web development, do not hesitate to purchase this book. It provides great overviews in many fields, addressing all the latest techniques and approaches to deliver great PHP applications.

It is indeed a great book that brings the PHP developer to a next level, describing all the current PHP hot topics, such as SPL, advanced object oriented programming techniques, unit testing, continuous integration, code documentation, PHP 6 features, the Standard PHP Library (SPL), MVC architecture among others.
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1. Pro PHP - Kev (2009-05-20 20:55)
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1. PHPClasses.org Blog: Book Review: Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More (2009-05-24 03:03)
The PHPClasses.org blog has posted a new book review of the APress book “Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More” (Kevin McArthur)...