The book does a decent job of covering the main OOP topics in PHP; as well as, touching upon some of the peripheral ones. Hayder devotes whole chapters to such topics as unit testing, design patterns, XML, SPL, and working with databases.

The review talks about the "Good", the "Bad" and the "Ugly" of the book ranging from the good code examples and the chapter on the SPL down to the flawed version of the Singleton used and the lack of commentary/explanations around the code.

Of course, when it comes to specifying how visible a certain class property or method will be, you know that PHP 5 permits you to work with three distinct levels of access, called "public," "protected," and "private" respectively. [...] As you may have noticed, however, I've not taught you how to define private methods yet, which is something that can definitely be very useful if you want to restrict the access to your classes from the outside more severely.

The tutorial shows the creation of a class with private properties and then expands it to include a private method. Then they call it from an object, an example of the error PHP kicks back is there too. He also includes the concept of a "getter" to call the private function from a public one.

"Do not use getters and setters" looks like a hastily advise, but its meaning is very important and it is "do not break encapsulation", which moves us to the question what the encapsulation is.

He notes that encapsulation is, in essence, hiding parts of the code away so that the user/other coders only see a little bit of the magic that happens. He argues that getters and setters are a valid part of the encapsulation process and that designing a good, easy to use system almost requires them.

Today most of the popular programming languages support objects, limiting scope, modularity, passing by value, and sophisticated built-in types. There should be no reason to deliberately expose an object's data to the rest of the code because the language can enforce encapsulation and data hiding.

While not specific to PHP, the post does recommend against them because of one simple reason common to all languages that make them possible - they "break the encapsulation OOP offers". For them, they're like a cheat to get around bad coding practices and are not needed to make a successful application work.

In short: a very good concise introduction to OOP. I'll be keeping this on my desk for a while. The language use is strange but the code examples and the spread of topics make up for that in spades. This book has a very broad scope, but is clear in the essentials. If you're looking for an introduction to Objected Oriented Programming in PHP, I'd recommend this one.

The review gets into a bit more detail on "The Good", "The Bad" and "The Ugly" of its contents including its intro to OOP in PHP (good), the assumption that OOP is better than other programming types (bad) and the poor structure of the book (the ugly).

Kargo derives significant competitive advantage as their application designers & producers make use of Zend Framework to build their next generation mobile application platform on. [...] Zend Technologies will present an introduction to the modular "use at will" PHP 5 components in Zend Framework and Kargo will outline the high-performance messaging server and mobile internet platform they've built.

You can find out more about the meetup from its page on Upcoming and check out this page for more details and a map to the location (New York, NY).

Packt Publishing recently sent me a couple of books to review, so let's start with Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder. According to the introduction, the book is intended for beginners to intermediate PHP5 programmers and the first chapter has a good introduction to what object oriented programming is and why you would want to use it.

He glosses over the first few chapters of the book (introductory stuff mostly) and points out three others specifically - Chapter 5 covering reflection and unit testing, Chapter 6 covering the SPL and Chapter 9 dealing with SimpleXML and DOM.

Putting the aspects of Hayder's grasp of the English language aside, the book is rather good as an introduction to the various technologies that it covers.

He points out a few things of note - the beginner OOP chapters (only made for the newbies out there), the contents of the main OOP chapter and the good section on PHPUnit and unit testing. He also has a few suggestions of things that could make the book a bit better, including a personal suggestion on code formating and braces.

If you're anything like me, you have had your head spinning with questions [...] these and other dilemmas (add your own to the list) sometimes make peace of mind a nearly impossible goal.

The tutorial talks about a few simple methods for running benchmark data including the use of microtime(), an OOP method and wrapping the call inside a method of their class.

Whether it is for database submission, emailing, or for some other purpose, forms represent the primary means of enabling a user to send data to an application. As a result, it is important to have control over the data collected by your forms, which will aid in the creation of streamlined, error-free applications.

He lays out the validation method in a graphic going with a generic validation class that then calls the various validation methods (like phone or email) as needed. The "validation set" manages which validations are to be run on which form elements. Example code for each of the bits making up the structure and the implementation are provided.