Great book to catch up on OOP in PHP
So as some of you already know, in my venture to keep up on the development community and trends, I have started to review books for Packt Publishing. They have sent me a few books to read and review, and I will be posting them to my blog for everyone to read. I have picked books from them that I believe are topics worth exploring and actually reading from a book (and not just finding a resource online).
The first book that was delivered is the one that this post is dedicated to. Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder was picked to go over what I believe to be the base of successfully programming in PHP. Object oriented programming is not an option anymore when working in this business. So if you have been stuck as a procedural programming in PHP it's time to remedy that and apply some new (well not really new) techniques and master the language.
Hayder begins the book off with exactly that, discussing and demonstrating the differences between Procedural PHP and Object Oriented PHP. I believe this knowledge to be essential to start your OO voyage. Pay attention to examples in this chapter as they give some good feedback on what cases OO is necessary. Hayder also explains the differences between PHP4 and PHP5's OO approach for anyone who has PHP4 systems still in play. After that Chapter 2 goes into the nitty gritty basics of using OOP in PHP, including a sections on using interfaces and abstract classes.
The next chapter that sparked some interest is the chapter on Design Patterns, including some of my favorites: Singleton Pattern, Lazy Loading, and Adaptor Pattern. This is a must read if you will be developing frameworks or working with some of the more modern frameworks like Zend Framework. Here at NFi Studios we do framework development on top of Zend and commonly use some of these patterns.
Another hot topic over at work is Unit Testing, which is covered briefly in Chapter 5, I recommend reading this chapter and checking out the section on TDD (Test Driven Development), and the brief section on PHPUnit. I do however wish this section was a little bigger, but this is a book on OOP and I guess I could get a book on Unit Testing later on.
Other topics covered in this book include PDO (which is a database staple of Zend Framework), XML and MVC (which is the most popular architectural pattern in the PHP web development world). The books strong points are its definitions of OO concepts and examples given about them. So if you have a brief understanding of Object Oriented Programming but don't understand all of the concepts, this book is for you.
For a good yet shorter read on PHP techniques using OOP I recommend this book. It gives you a good synopsis of big topics and gives you the ability to dive into bigger more complex books and some of the web resources and API's out there.
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Don't Buy
The author is obviously not comfortable with the English language, and not from a teaching background. The book has frequent errors, is not easy reading and just plain is not a book that is easy to learn from - maybe not even possible to learn from. I've taught myself over a dozen programming languages from books and I am a competent PHP programmer who just wants to add OOP style, yet this book was useless to me.
Same as the documentation...but as interpreted by a non english speaker and with less examples
Read the php online docs instead, their examples are much better explained. What do you expect from a book with a clipart flower on the cover? Cheaply produced, outsourced, and spammzor'ed to everyone registered in the stupid php classes website.
Great book for all PHP users!
I have looked at a lot of books relating to OOP and PHP, and Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 is the first to clearly explain PHP and OOP, and how they worked together. This book explains concepts in a way that is easily understood. Hasin Hayder writes the concepts in a very clear to understand method and gives plenty of working examples of each concept.
The book is great for people who are new to the concept of OOP in PHP, or those who know PHP OOP and just need a refresher. The book covers the basics, reminds us of certain practices that are considered best, and those practices that are often forgotten.
Hasin covers the concepts of XML and MySQLi with regard to their use in the OOP world. The XML chapter is amazing! After reading through it I was able to understand and effectively use SimpleXML and the DOMDocument to manipulate XML with ease in PHP5.
Another strong point of the book is it's introduction and explanation of MVC and what it is, how it is used, and some of the more popular MVC frameworks for PHP. This chapter was particularly interesting to me as I am always looking for ways to develop better, faster, stronger applications and this overview of MVC Frameworks made it clear the path to be taken.
Unclear, fails to communicate OO principles
With PHP 5.3 looking very close to release, bringing with it significant changes such as namespaces, this is an awkward time to release a PHP book of any generality. Within a few months it will be clearer how well the new features are taking hold and there is almost certainly going to be a clamour for books that show how new features affect development practices and how to make use of them. Even without that, it is hard to recommend this book as it fails to live up to its promise and provides a poor introduction to Object-Oriented programming.
The book's first problem is the poor quality of the English contained. The author does not appear to be a native English speaker and the publisher has apparently done little to clean up the language. For the most part that simply makes for some curious rhythm and phrasing but there are a number of places where it contributes to inaccuracies, such as constant confusion between objects and classes. Finding such inaccuracies alongside mistakes such as confusing polymorphism and inheritance I'm left wondering how well the authors really know their subject. Packt would do well to employ another reviewer to clean up the syntax and definitions before any reprints.
The structure of the book is curious. Rather than approaching topics through the use of an example project or projects, the author gives disconnected samples, often offering little beyond that which can be found in the online PHP documentation and generally failing to explain how techniques would be useful. While he insists that PHP5's Reflection API is an important tool, there is little to back up that assertion. There's a large code sample and a list of the methods and attributes of a reflection object, but no real substance. The database section covers some key examples, such as PDO, ADODB and MDB2, and touches on the ActiveRecord pattern, but uses four pages to list the RDBMSs that ADODB supports and then only spends a page and a half on ActiveRecord, failing to explain either its concepts or advantages in any detail.
The high point of the book is the half chapter on unit testing. A few well chosen examples provide a demonstration of how code can be tested and how that allows for refactoring without fear of regressions. The reasons for unit testing are clear as is basic usage of PHPUnit. I'd have liked to see further examples rather than several pages listing all the default assertions PHPUnit provides, and I disagree with the claim that there should never be more than one assertion per test (individual tests should focus on a single concern, but can use multiple assertions to do so) but by that point in the book it was good just to see a section that made its point clearly.
Fundamentally, I came away from this book feeling it had failed to communicate clearly the core principles or reasons for object oriented programming. By trying to cram in too much reference material, not offering clear contexts for each technique, and not lingering on ideas like encapsulation the book fails to instill OO techniques.
Disclaimer: I was sent a free copy of this book to review
(5 reviews)
