Professional PHP5 added February 21, 2011

Many PHP books advocate poor programming practices (such as hacking together a system without truly planning it out carefully or incorporating manual "tweaks" to accomplish desired results), but this one is dramatically different. It is in many ways a software engineering text that merely happens to use PHP as the programming language. Advanced object-oriented programming concepts are carefully addressed, adn teh examples used are non-trivial.

While many of the concepts addresssed may be unnecessary for smaller projects, it is helpful to read explanations of a broad range of challenges involved in software projects of all sizes.

Here is an outline of the book:

Part 1: Object-Oriented Software Development Concepts

• an introduction to object-oriented programming
• a discussion of the unified modeling language (UML)
• a demonstration of objects in practice
• a discussion of design patterns

Part 2: Creating a Reusable Object Toolkit I: Simple Utility Classes and Interfaces

• a Collection class
• a CollectionIterator class
• a Generic Object class
• a discussion of database abstraction layers
• a discussion of the factory interface
• an introduction to event-driven programming
• principles of logging and debugging
• an introduction to SOAP

Part 3: Creating a Reusable Object Toolkit II: Completx (Though Not Complicated) Utilities

• an introduction to model, view, controller (MVC) architecture
• an overview of communicating with users
• a discussion of sessions and authentication
• a functional unit testing framework
• discussions of finite state machines (FSMs) and custom configuration files

Part 4: Test Case: Sales Force Automation

• an overview of the case study project
• project management methodologies
• a discussion of project planning
• an overview of systems architecture
• assembling a project toolkit
• a discussion of quality assurance
• a discussion of project deployment
• a sample reporting platform
• further topics in software development