Rating:  - good style, good information
i enjoyed reading the book and learned a lot though i consider myself as an expierenced php programmer. basic and advanced stuff together with a balanced mixture. patterns make programming complex software architectures easier.
Rating: - very helpful book
This was the exact right book at the right time for me. I have been managing a php software project for the past 5 years and it's growing harder to deal with. I had started to make some haphazard use of design patterns, cvs, and pear already. It's hard to find time away from daily business pressures to improve one's practices, but this book brought together some very useful techniques and tools in a concise way. I've read patterns books for other languages, but having the examples in php with special attention to php 5's oo improvements made this one much more useful and quicker to absorb for me.
Rating:  - Pretty good book
I'm already reasonably educated on basic patterns. However, I did like this book. It was a good read. I'd highly suggest it for anyone writing PHP and needs to grasp OO development.
However, I was expecting a little bit more in the "Practice" section of this book. I was expecting a few more real world examples to show how the author would use patterns or even Object Oriented PHP in a real world application.
Since there are so few well designed OO PHP projects out there, I was hoping to see something that was specifically OO (as OO as PHP can be anyway) practice... A quick form based multi-page site would have been nice. While that may sound like a lot, it shouldn't take more than 1 chapter (about 30 pages) to show the code and briefly go over it.
So, all-in-all, this book is a great tutorial on PHP OO design. What it lacked (for me anyway), was real world examples of good OO design.
Rating: - Serious Stuff on PHP OOP
I liked this book. It is probably the first I have run across that treats PHP as a serious development environment, addressing it to enterprise level tasks. That said, let me add a cautionary warning, this book is not for the novice to OOP.
Mr. Zandstra approaches his task by dividing the content into three sections: 1) Objects - covering various basic and advanced concepts in OOP as they apply to PHP, from polymorphism and encapsulation to abstracts, error handling and interfaces, 2) Patterns - using a few sources (including the 'Gang of Four') he covers composition, object generation, tasks and layers among other topics, 3) Practices - offering a little advice on how and why to use patterns and standards, as well as some coverage of PEAR, documenting and version control.
From a practical standpoint, I found the book interesting, but somewhat overwhelming. Let me try to clarify that a little. This book is targeted at enterprise level development, meaning serious business level coding/development. Most of my work in PHP so far, while it makes use of OOP, is relatively small scale (15-20 classes ranging from 200-1500 lines each in my most complex site). While I can see the logic in the patterns and practices that Zandstra writes about, the overall content is overkill for my scale of project. Now that isn't to say that I found the book useless, there are many of the concepts that the author discusses that will find their way into my design and code; I just won't be doing a wholesale pattern refactoring of my code (a viewpoint I get the feeling the author would agree with).
If you are a professional developer, I would recommend this book as a good read and part of your PHP reference library. If you are not an enterprise level developer and are just looking for sample code to help solve or implement solutions I would recommend PHP 5 Recipes (Apress).
Rating: - Super clear explanation of OOP
If you are a programmer of any language that supports Objects, this book is for you. This is one of the most clear introduction to all aspects of object design programming I saw so far for a programming language. This is not a "cookbook" with Php recipes, it is a really well written guide to proper software architecture design with Php. So good that you'll find useful also for other languages. Almost all advanced topics regarding Php5 are also covered. Really useful the practices section. PHP developers: please READ! You know, Data Types actually exist! A must have!
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