Some time ago nice people from Packt Publishing sent me review copy of Expert PHP 5 Tools book written by Dirk Merkel. The book has 437 pages, so it took me a while to read it and create a review.
My first impression is that book was created mainly for advanced users, there is no place for teaching reader PHP programming, author assumes your skilled enough to get thru it and understand the source, more over the book is not that much about programming itself. So what’s it about? I think that statement from the cover page sums it nicely “Proven enterprise development tools and best practices for designing and deploying PHP applications”.
First two chapters are about source code: coding standards and documentation with PHPDoc. Basically if you read Zend Framework coding standards, you can skip at least first of this chapters. I also had quite strange feeling that author implies that only “his” coding standards are the only good ones – which is well … not true.
From the chapter 3 we get to the nuts and bolts of the book … expert tools. First one is Eclipse with PDT extension. If phrase Integrated Development Environment (or IDE) tells you nothing you should really check out this chapter. Using IDE is one of the easiest ways to improve your development speed and Dirk explains exactly how to do it.
Chapter four is all about SVN. If you are not using yet some version control system this chapter is a great way to get you started … and by the way, if you are not using version control you are shooting yourself in the foot. Chapter five covers debugging (mainly) with XDebug. I liked it. I did not realize that there are so many options available in XDebug.
Chapter 6 is about PHP Frameworks, it describes briefly some of the most popular frameworks and than focuses on the Zend Framework, i find it as nice and detailed introduction to ZF. Next chapter is about Unit Tests. I have to admit i was never a big fan of unit testing, but if you want to learn how to do it the right way this chapter will do it for you.
Last three chapters (8, 9, 10) are about automation in terms of: application deployment, design and development. Automation is one of the best thing you can do for your application, the less human interaction is needed for deployment the smaller are chances of making a mistake. I think that deployment is one of the most important “things” any developer does (especially if you are just updating live sites) so i guess that every professional developer should take some time to read about it.
Despite there were parts i didn’t liked that much i find this book very informative and innovative in a way that author presented how PHP applications/software should be developed. I think that if you have your programming skills nailed down “Expert PHP 5 Tools” book is a natural step to become a better developer.
3 Comments on "Expert PHP 5 Tools – book review"
usefull info. thanks for share.
Thanks for sharing. Am on it right now and am loving it already.
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