PHP 8 Objects, Patterns, and Practice

Book excerpt: Learn how to develop elegant and rock-solid systems using PHP, aided by three key elements: object fundamentals, design principles, and best practices. The 6th edition of this popular book has been fully updated for PHP 8, including attributes, constructor property promotion, new argument and return pseudo-types, and more. It also covers many features new since the last edition including typed properties, the null coalescing operator, and void return types. This book provides a solid grounding in PHP's support for objects, it builds on this foundation to instill core principles of software design and then covers the tools and practices needed to develop, test, and deploy robust code. PHP 8 Objects, Patterns, and Practice begins by covering PHP's object-oriented features. It introduces key topics including class declarations, inheritance, and reflection. The next section is devoted to design patterns. It explains the principles that make patterns powerful. You’ll cover many of the classic design patterns including enterprise and database patterns. The last segment of the book covers the tools and practices that can help turn great code into a successful project. The section shows how to manage multiple developers and releases with git, and how to manage builds and dependencies with Composer. It also explores strategies for automated testing and continuous integration. After reading and using this book, you will have mastered object-oriented enhancements, design patterns, and the essential development tools available for PHP 8. 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, managing error conditions with exceptions, and creating abstract classes and interfaces Understand and 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 Guarantee a successful project including unit testing; version control and build, installation, and package management; and continuous integration 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. It is also 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.