Object-Oriented PHP Best Practices: A Small Handbook of Conventions for Writing Readable, Sustainable OOPHP Code

Object-Oriented PHP Best Practices is a book for beginners to object-oriented programming in a PHP environment. Ikram, a web developer who has been building websites since 2001, and his colleagues spent a year rewriting a 450,000-line educational system written in PHP that was an utter and complete mess, the result of a decade of constant changes in programmers in managers, with such wonders as a 2000 line functions doing upwards of 100 database calls to retrieve a student's name, and with band-aids thrown over known issues, and band-aids thrown over these band-aids, until the general accretion of mistakes and bad judgments had led to entire parts of the system being so massively convoluted that no previous programmer had been willing to touch them. As the team refactored the project, Ikram was tasked with taking extensive notes to create a list of conventions that would ease the task of rescuing the project from its tar pit, and more importantly, prevent it from falling back into the pit again as time passed and the project changed hands again. The result was a conventions document that Ikram extended into this book, which summarizes his most important findings. Ikram presents a set of simple yet powerful conventions (sometimes unintuitive) that ensure an object-oriented PHP project stays lean, modular, easy to read and easy to build upon. Most PHP programmers eventually gravitate toward these conventions as they learn painful lessons from past mistakes. This book takes the pain out of the process by identifying these mistakes early and helping you avoid them before you make them.