Product Details

• Paperback: 487 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 2nd ed. edition (December 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590599098
• ISBN-13: 978-1590599099
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds

Matt Zandstra is one of my favourite voices of the PHP community. He writes in the style most suitable to my taste. Easy to follow, easy to understand with well thought examples and tutorials. He starts everything from the beginning, and drives you through the pros and contras of the given solution. While telling you how to do and why, he doesn't get dogmatic. You'll understand the what-when-why-how of the content and intent. This book is about becoming a senior from a junior PHP developer. Drives you from shotgun surgery and waterfall to TDD and agile. Though the latter two you'll have to find other books, but I'm sure you'd be wanting to. Nice work Matt! :) I've read the Second Edition, but there's a third one released a week ago. If you (and I hope you do) want to read it, you should buy the new edition. (amazon)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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.

It's good to see the progress in fellow coders' work. Brandon Savage explains what he had discovered about the Registry Pattern lately.

The Registry Pattern Reexamined

March 26th, 2010 @ 7:00 am Last July, I wrote about the registry pattern and some of its advantages. These advantages include the ability to access objects across different areas of your application, and the storage of objects for later retrieval. Much of the debate in the comments focused on whether or not the registry pattern was suitable for today’s object-oriented development, and some of the arguments focused on whether or not the “global scope” was a good place to have objects. For me, over the last few months, I’ve discovered two reasons why I advise against the Registry Pattern: first and foremost, it discourages unit testing, and secondly, it discourages good design. Unit testing is predicated on the assumption that you are testing small, discrete units of code that do not have dependencies. This requires that developers do everything they can to either remove dependencies or mock them in such a way that the dependencies are neutralized as contributors to the failure of the unit being tested. In PHP 5, objects are not copied when assigned; instead, their address in a hash table is copied. This means that if you retrieve an object from the registry, and then modify it, every subsequent retrieval from the registry will reflect that modification. The reason this creates a significant issue is that it prevents you from testing a discrete unit of code. Now, instead of one thing being the variable in a test failure, there are two: the unit of code being tested and the object it retrieved from the registry. Any time there is more than one possibility for failure, the effectiveness of the unit testing is diminished. As a side note, the same holds true of singletons: modifications to the singleton object will be reflected in every other test performed during that request, thus reducing the efficacy of the unit tests. Secondly, I’ve found that the registry pattern promotes poorer design overall. The reason for this is clear: because you can store an object for later use, there is no need to consider the path through the application that the object might otherwise need to travel. There’s no determination where, when and how to get the object to where it is needed. You can simply pull it from thin air on demand. This leads to developers being lazy about their architecture, and ultimately leads to poorer code (which you can’t determine through tests because the objects keep changing during testing!). Dependency injection forces developers to think about why they’re doing what it is that they’re doing. Moreover, using dependency injection means that you’re more likely to employ good development practices like abstraction, composition over inheritance, etc. The reason for this is because as a developer, when you start injecting three or four or five objects, you begin to consider why; this often leads to a refactoring, and ultimately a better finished product. As I stated before, design patterns are not the problem, and each design pattern has an important reason for existing and solves a very real problem. The registry pattern shouldn’t be forbidden or never practiced, but it should be practiced sparingly, along with all other design patterns, because it isn’t a one-size fits all solution. The original work of Brandon Savage.

A good writing about the solution to this problem describes the Dependency Inversion Principle one of the 5 SOLID development principles is on Giorgio Sironi's blog, you should consider saving in your reader.

High level classes should not depend on low level classes. Both should depend upon abstractions. Details should depend upon abstractions. Abstractions should not depend upon details.

Read the solution on Invisible To The Eye >>>

Continuing the post Validators - the beginning This post is about age validation. The implementation below let's you easily define a date that will be used as a reference date. Values same or older tan this date will produce the validation to pass, other will not. [cc lines="-1" lang="php" escaped="true"] This implementation assumes that the default validation only * validates for dates 13 years or older. * * @param string $reference The date to refer to. */ public function __construct($reference="-13 years") { $this->_referenceAge = strtotime($reference); } /** * Validates that the given date is earlier or equal than the * reference age * * @param string $date An strtotime capable string * * @return bool true if valid, false otherwise */ public function validate($date) { $val = strtotime($date); return $val_referenceAge; } } ?> [/cc]

unit test

[cc lines="-1" lang="php" escaped="true" theme="blackboard" width="510"] object = new AgeValidator(); } else { $this->object = new AgeValidator($refDate); } $actual = $this->object->validate($value); $this->assertEquals($expected, $actual); } } ?> [/cc]