This book takes you beyond the PHP basics to the enterprise development practices used by professional programmers. Updated for PHP 5.3 with new sections on closures, namespaces, and continuous integration, this edition will teach you about object features such as abstract classes, reflection, interfaces, and error handling. You’ll also discover object tools to help you learn more about your classes, objects, and methods.

Then you’ll move into design patterns and the principles that make patterns powerful. You’ll learn both classic design patterns and enterprise and database patterns with easy-to-follow examples.

Finally, you’ll discover how to put it all into practice to help turn great code into successful projects. You’ll learn how to manage multiple developers with Subversion, and how to build and install using Phing and PEAR. You’ll also learn strategies for automated testing and building, including continuous integration.

Taken together, these three elements—object fundamentals, design principles, and best practices—will help you develop elegant and rock-solid systems.

What you’ll learn

• Learn to work with object fundamentals: writing classes and methods, instantiating objects, and creating powerful class hierarchies using inheritance.
• Master advanced object-oriented features, including static methods and properties.
• Learn how to manage error conditions with exceptions, and create abstract classes and interfaces.
• Understand and use design principles to deploy objects and classes effectively in your projects.
• Learn about design patterns, their purpose and structure, and the underlying principles that govern them.
• Discover a set of powerful patterns that you can deploy in your own projects.
• Learn about the tools and practices that can guarantee a successful project including unit testing; version control; build, installation, and package management; and continuous integration.

Who this book is for

This book is suitable for anyone with at least a basic knowledge of PHP who wants to use its object-oriented features in their projects.

Those who already know their interfaces from their abstracts may well still find it hard to use these features in their projects. These users will benefit from the book’s emphasis on design. They will learn how to choose and combine the participants of a system, how to read design patterns, and how to use them in their code.

Finally, this book is for PHP coders who want to learn about the practices and tools (version control, testing, continuous integration, etc.) that can make projects safe, elegant, and stable.