Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications

Finally a book written for serious PHP application developers. This book really gets it. Using Test-Driven Development from the very first chapter, the book explains practical TDD such as using in-memory databases. There are clear examples of stubs and mocks. Caring so much about TDD, this book also teaches how to write proper Object-oriented Code, utilizing proven best practices and design patterns.As if that weren't enough, this book also covers PHP frameworks but by no means relies on them. Just glancing at the table of contents was enough for me to buy this book--as there weren't yet any reviews written for it on Amazon.After reading the first chapter alone--where the authors quote "Uncle Bob's" Clean Code book--I had a good feeling that I was reading something that would finally help PHP developers write truly good code.I haven't made it through the whole book yet but it has already earned its way as my favorite PHP book, and I have read a lot of them over the last several years.

Solid book about testing your PHP code. There are some good case studies in there with some of the well known PHP frameworks that switched from integration tests to unit tests. The book can be considered old, but it has solid testing principles inside!

The contents of this book represent a good summary of best practices for developing web applications. The case studies provide an interesting look behind the scenes of real projects. There should be no big surprises, if you're already doing a good job as a developer or project manager.

perfect to the point where they mention projects that no longer existslove the airlines usecase :)

The title should have indicated that this is about "Testing Real-World Solutions....", and left the word "Developing" out. But who wants a book on testing software. I'm sure it deserves more stars, but I couldn't bring myself to read very much about testing software. On the food chain of Boring Dinner-Party Conversations About What You Do, I'm sure Software Testers are just below Software developers...

Disclaimer: I was sent a free copy for review.I am not a big believer in programming books. Over the years I have seen only a few that were worth reading, but Real-World Solutions (perhaps a shorter title would be nice...) is a great read. Read not reference. Most programming related books end up as "reference" which is generally useless in the world of Google and StackOverflow. Real-World Solutions is meant to be read, perhaps while looking at your own code and trying a few things out. I also suggest scanning sections that do not apply to you, or you have already mastered.Most of the book focuses on testing. Unit testing primarily and this could be very dull. However the choice to have stories from real implementations by companies was smart. They also included sections of common problems with (my favorite) more that one suggested solution!I wish there had been some reference to how the lone coder (such as myself currently) could implement a more agile methods. Also a listing of programs, frameworks, and tools with a one line description and then page numbers would have also been nice for those reading on the couch and then later recall the idea of a tool, but not the name.Overall this book is great for:PHP programmer learning or weak in testing knowledge.A self-taught PHP programmer who wants to find some holes in knowledge (like me!)Teachers who want to give students a programming book they might actually read.A manager of programmers trying to find new ways to increase code quality.

I've not completely read this book through yet, so this is only a partial review of the content I have got through so far.From what I've read I'd say that this is for the most part a high quality book that gives a lot of good advice. It makes a strong argument as to why dependency injection is tremendously preferable to hard coded dependencies and it describes in detail the kinds of problems you can run into if you do hard code your dependencies.There are some things in the chapters on testing that I think need to be addressed, though. The main one is it advocates direct testing of non-public methods (by subclassing the CUT to expose its protected methods as public). This can make the test fragile, as it's now making assumptions about the inner workings of the class instead of testing its API. Normally you should be able to change or completely remove non-public code without having to worry about the effect it has on the tests. If you're testing non-public methods directly, then you can easily break a test by changing or removing it, making the test fragile. Fragile tests are something the book argues against, with good reason.If you exercise all the public methods of a class properly within your unit test, then all the non-public methods should also be exercised as well. If they are not, then this indicates that either the unit test isn't thorough enough, or that there is dead code in the CUT.This is still, however, a very useful resource, and written to a much higher standard than most PHP books. I'd say it's a must-read, and would have given it 5 stars if not for the non-public method testing remarks.

I would say that this is the best book on PHP I've read. To clarify, this is not a book for beginners, it assumes a lot of prior knowledge. What it does give you is a selection of essays on how to develop good quality PHP code, written by people who've done it.Unsurprisingly, as the book's editor wrote the unit-testing framework PHPUnit, testing features prominently throughout. This is a good thing, in my view, as proper testing and PHP have for too long not been mentioned in the same sentence. One of the early chapters goes through the refactoring of a typical PHP class in order to make it testable - this gives a good oversight of how testable code should be written. And testable code is usually good code.Other chapters go through such topics as Test-Driven Development and Continuous Integration. There is also a good chapter on how to test database interactions, which could be a tricky subject.As with all books on web technologies, certain parts are now out-of-date (for example, the chapter on the Symfony framework has been superseded by the release of Symfony2). I'm hoping a revised edition will be out soon.

Gift for my son who has used it as a revision guide. As described and has proved very useful to him