PHP 8 Objects, Patterns, and Practice: Volume 1

Develop elegant and rock-solid systems using PHP, aided by three key elements: object fundamentals, design principles, and best practices. Now in its 7th edition, this book has been fully updated for PHP 8.3 and split into two volumes to better accommodate its wealth of new content. Volume 1 covers objects and patterns, while Volume 2 focuses on tools and best practices.

You’ll begin this volume by reviewing PHP's object-oriented features including key topics such as class declarations, inheritance, and reflection. The second part of the book is devoted to design patterns. It explains the principles that make patterns powerful and covers many of the classic design patterns, as well as enterprise and database patterns.

This volume provides a solid grounding in PHP's support for objects and builds on this foundation to apply the core principles of software design. New topics covered include read only classes, enumerations, typed class constants, as well as various additions to argument and return types. The knowledge gained from this book will help you master the object-oriented enhancements and the design patterns available for PHP 8, paving the way for developing best practices in Volume 2.

What You Will Learn

• Work with object fundamentals.
• Write classes and methods, instantiate objects, and create powerful class hierarchies using inheritance.
• Master advanced object-oriented features, including static methods and properties.
• Manage error conditions with exceptions and create abstract classes and interfaces.
• Use design principles to deploy objects and classes effectively in your projects.
• Discover a set of powerful patterns that you can implement in your own projects.

Who This Book Is For

Anyone with at least a basic knowledge of PHP who wants to use its object-oriented features in their projects.

Matt Zandstra has worked as a web programmer, consultant, and writer for over two decades. In addition to this book, he is the author of SAMS Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours (three editions) and is a contributor to DHTML Unleashed. He has written articles for Linux Magazine, Zend, IBM DeveloperWorks, and php|architect Magazine, and also writes fiction. 

Matt was a senior developer/tech lead at Yahoo and API tech lead at LoveCrafts. He now runs an agency that advises companies on their architectures and system management, and develops systems primarily with PHP, Python, and Java.