PHPClasses.org has posted a new book review today. It's a look at another of Hasin Hayder's books, this one published by Packt - Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 (as reviewed by Ryan Partington).

"Object Oriented Programming with PHP5" is a book that helps understanding many of the core OOP features within PHP, whilst looking at the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern and unit testing.

Ryan comments of a few issues he found with the book include the not-quite-an-introduction-level first chapter and the "More OOP" section that read like a copy of the php.net manual. Overall, though, his opinion is that it's a good book and provides a good overview of database functionality and the MVC design pattern.

Stefan Mischook has released his latest tutorial covering OOP in PHP in a bit more iPod-friendly format:

I just released my beginners object oriented php video tutorials in iPod format. These videos target total beginners to object oriented programing. Though I talk about PHP, the principles are universal and so they apply to all OO (object oriented) languages.

Tutorial in the list include:

• Beginners Object Oriented PHP
• Classes and Objects in PHP
• Building Objects in PHP - Part 1 & 2
• Build Objects in PHP - Part 3

Check out these and other great videos on the KillerPHP.com website.

New on the Developer Tutorials blog today is this post offering up a few ideas (five of them) on how they think you can become a better programmer.

In this post, I'll outline five ways to be a better developer, improve your productivity, write less code and achieve more with your web applications.There's always more to learn when it comes to PHP development. New core functions, new frameworks, new design patterns, new code documentation styles. Here are some of the best ways you can become a better PHP developer.

His five suggestions are:

• Read the manual
• Browse through some code
• Learn a new framework
• Research
• Learn OOP

I can understand where he's coming from on all but the third one - frameworks are nice, but it's more important to get the fundamentals down first before making a framework some of your first experience.

To finish up their series looking at using the Yahoo! web service search functionality in a PHP5 application, DevShed has posted this look at integrating the search functionality into a preexisting application.

In simple terms, my plan will consist of creating some compact and modular PHP 5 classes, which will define a few basic methods for working with the different web services offered by Yahoo!.

They take the code they created from before (earlier parts of the series) and format it to fit into its own standalone class that can be included anywhere in an application. They create the class so it can search not only the normal results but it can also pull in the data from the video search Yahoo! offers as well.

Reinhold Weber has put together a list of signs (40 in all on his "programming list of shame") that you're a lousy PHP programmer. Here's a sampling:

• don't see the need and/or benefits of a good programming IDE like Zend Studio or Eclipse PDT
• have never used some form of version control like Subclipse
• don't use a consistent methodology
• don't use test-driven development
• don't return content but echo or print it from your functions or classes
• return HTML, not data, strings, or objects.
• don't allow intelligent error handling
• you think reusable software equals/requires your code to be OOP

Now granted, some of them are a bit more high level than others, but if you're not headed towards a lot of these, you might change paths, hop out of that comfort zone and branch out into the community and the language a little bit more.

Terry Chay, a popular speaker at many of the PHP conferences and photog to the geek chic crowd in San Francisco, will be speaking at the upcoming PHP Meetup for the SF PHP group. He'll be giving a talk titled "OOps! The PHP Fear and Loathing Guide to OO Design".

How does the PHP developer in the trenches create powerful object-orientation code? By doing what the PHP's architects did, of course: cherry picking the most pragmatic of OOP principles and patterns! This talk is targeted at the PHP developer who has basic knowledge of PHP OOP syntax but wants to find out where OOP principles can fit into a program.

If you'd like to attend, head over to the meetup page for the event and let them know you're coming. It'll be happening at the CNet Network offices February 7th @ 7pm.