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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Great book but...
Comment: This is a really great book for advanced developers who whant learn abount php5 OOP technique; it explain very well how objects work and how to use the most famous patterns but it fails in third section: "The Practice".
CVS, PHPDoc and Phing, for me, are not enought for a good "Practice".
The entire book use too much simplistic examples, and so, is very difficult, for a beginner, to use all book concepts in real world.
I hope that in the next edition, Matt will fill this gap.
Bye From Italy
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Comment: I've personally read about 100+ IT-related books, ranging from Certification Crams, Networking, Programming, and even computer repair. I've developed with PHP for almost 7 years now, having over 10 years of development language experience overall with other languages. What I'm about to say may surprise some, some may even find it hard to believe, and even more will absolutely disregard it as truth. On the flip side, what I am about to say may intrigue you, have you yearning to learn more, or even have you ready to go buy the book at this very moment. Either way that's your opinion, your thoughts and ultimately your decision. I'm simply telling it how it is, while being as truthful as I possibly can be.
PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice is by far, the most thought out, well planned and pleasant books I've read on any subject, period. Most technical books leave you feeling like the author was some sort of robot from Mars, sent to Earth intent upon teaching humans how to write code. This book takes a totally different approach, an approach that I could only dream of taking to explain advanced concepts that Mr. Zandstra explains.
The book begins with giving the reader a "blast to the past" look at how PHP started out, how it evolved and what we should be expecting to see in the future. It explains how OOP came into being, how it became much more than the author's could ever dream, and how it eventually became the selling point for PHP. After giving you a brief history lesson, it finally starts into the actual technical sections. Once again, they follow the idea of showing the reader where PHP went wrong, and then finally how they made up for it by doing it the way it was supposed to have been done.
The first three chapters explain the above in extreme and perfect detail. The following chapters begin your development cycle by first bringing the reader up to speed on OOP basics followed by advanced topics that help mold your mind around working in PHP's brand new OOP environment. The chapters after basically keep building on top of that foundation, zeroing in on trouble areas followed by intelligent solutions to each problem. Every single page I read, I learned something new. Every single exercise, I said to myself, wow...I can't believe I've made it this far without knowing this.
What makes this book so appealing to me is that it's not meant for the newbie as almost every book you find at Barnes and Nobel will be. Instead, it's directed at the seasonal developer, the developer who has already been coding in PHP for 4+ years, developed long enough to know what PHP can and cannot do. It's also for the developer who has longed for a book that gives us incentive for moving to 5 and away from our trusty stable PHP 4 release.
Matt uses such an impressive means of explaining how things work, that I probably have learned more in this 470 page book (yes, I even read the Appendixes, which is an honest-to-God first for me) than I've learned in any 1000+ page book. Every time I met a new chapter, I found myself ready to open the trusty laptop and try it out instead of skipping about 10 chapters to finally get to a place that actually covered something meaningful.
Matt Zandstra, my hat is off to you. This book was everything I have been looking for in a PHP book.
-Jonathon Hibbard 02/15/08
Application Developer, HSR Business to Business
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