First I think it's important to cover the valuable aspects of the book as that will really drive your decision whether the book is worth a read. If you are new to object oriented programming and basic design patterns you will get a fairly good introduction of how to do both in PHP.

He points out some of his favorite parts of the book - the chapter on exceptions, chapter three covering the Standard PHP library - and some of the things he thought could be improved like the order of the parts of the book (4 should be after 1) and his disappointment in the lack of security/scalability/performance topics.

When the title talks about patterns, frameworks, testing and more it's not kidding. Kevin McArthur has managed to stuff a lot of information into the three hundred and some pages which make up this book. The inevitable trade-off is that no one section is a complete introduction to the subject it's covering. Despite this the book is filled with what I can only describe as, "Ah-hah!" and "Doh!" moments

While he found the book to be overall satisfying, there were a few things he'd like to change - not enough "enterprise-y" discussion for a book with "Pro" in the title, the "jack of all trades, master of none" feeling in the chapters and some issues with the Web 2.0 chapter that he feels only "partially relate to the core subject" of the book.

While being an easy read, this is a well written, serious book and is aimed squarely at enterprise-level developers and software engineers who make their living through the development and architecture of solutions developed in PHP.

He breaks down the book into the three sections its title mentions - working with objects, design patterns and a healthy dose of PEAR, phpDocumentor, PHPUnit, CVS and phing.

As the title suggests this book is about advanced PHP related topics, being divided into 5 parts and 21 chapters. The title enunciates the book will cover many different aspects, but you'll get disappointed as soon as you perceive it's only about 300 pages.

He jumps right in to the contents of the book - chapters on patterns, testing, documentation, the SPL, etc. His overall impression of the book was a good one, though, despite it trying to cover such a wide range of topics in "only about 300 pages".

The fill pattern is used to annotate text but the named pattern could also be used to fill any shapes that allow fill to be specified (include circles, ellipses, rectangles, polygons etc etc).

His example is pretty simple (with a "Hello World!" output) that pulls in the background image, creates the composite layer over it, adds the text to it and sets the fill to the background image's layer. The whole this is wrapped up and output as a PNG file.

Version 1.2 of the Workflow component that is part of the eZ Components adds support for the Cancel Case workflow pattern:

Once this Workflow pattern is called the complete Workflow instance is removed from the current execution (including any running nodes). You can find out more about the ezWorkflowNode in their documentation.

Promtped by a real world example, one often-overlooked feature of most regular expressions engines is how subpatterns can useful to whip up tokenizers relatively easily. The problem? I needed to match the word any of the words "Canton", "Region" or "Group" in a string and perform a follow up action depending on which matched.

His ultimate solution used a set of preg_match generated tokens to do the replaces a bit more reliably. It also makes it easy for other scripts (like his Python example) to use them too.

That's exactly the case with the subject of this article, the strategy pattern. To put things more clearly, I'm sure that you always validate adequately all the forms included in your web sites. First off, you create a few validation functions (or classes), then use these functions to check the validity of the data supplied by users, and finally determine the course of action to be taken accordingly.

To make the concept clearer, they Create a simple example - a file handling class that can read and write data to the file of the developer's choosing. This base class is then used inside their StrategySelector class to make saving both HTML and XML data as simple as a basic string.