Preface
PHP Master is aimed at intermediate PHP developers—those who have left their
newbie status behind, and are looking to advance their skills and knowledge. Our
aim as authors is to enable developers to refine their skills across a number of areas,
and so we’ve picked topics that we felt have stood us in the best stead to grow as
developers and progress our skills and careers.
It’s expected that you’ll already be working with at least some of the topics we
cover; however, even topics that may already be familiar to you are recommended
reading. PHP, perhaps more than many other languages, seems to attract people
from different walks of life. There’s no sense of discrimination against those with
no formal education in computing or in web development specifically. So while
you may be actively using several techniques laid out here, dipping in to the chapters
that follow could reveal new approaches, or illustrate some underlying theory that’s
new to you. It is possible to go a long way with the tricks you pick up in your dayto-
day work, but if you’re looking to cement those skills and gain a more solid
footing, you’re in the right place.
This book will assist you in making that leap from competent web developer to
confident software engineer—one who uses best practice, and gets the job done reliably
and quickly. Because we’re writing PHP as a way to make a living, just like
many of you do, we use a “how to” approach. The aim is to give you practical,
useful advice with real examples as you move through the sections of the book.
Whatever path brought you here, we hope you find what you’re looking for, and
wish you the best of everything as you travel onwards.
Who Should Read This Book
As stated, PHP Master is written for the intermediate developer. This means you
should have a solid grounding in the fundamentals of PHP—the syntax underpinning
the code, how functions and variables operate, constructs like foreach loops and
if/else statements, and how server-side scripts interact with client-side markup
(with HTML forms, for instance). We won’t be rehashing the basics—although
there’ll be plenty of references to concepts you should already be familiar with, and
you’ll be learning new ways to improve upon your existing techniques of generating
server-side applications.
We’re going to work to an object oriented programming game plan—and if that’s a
term you’ve heard mentioned before, you’ll certainly be hearing a lot more of it as
you progress through this book! OOP, as it’s commonly known, is a standard to
which good PHP developers adhere to ensure compliance with best practice, and
to make their code work as efficiently as possible. You’ll learn how to use OOP to
your advantage—creating classes, instantiating objects, and tightening your coding
processes, generating some handy templates for future projects en route. If you’re
already familiar with OOP, the opening chapter will serve as an excellent refresher,
and if not, make sure you start right from the beginning to gain the most from
reading PHP Master.
In addition, we’ll be working with databases—a key mode of storage for web applications.
A basic understanding of what databases are and how they work will help
you along, but we’ll be covering ways of connecting to them in great depth, as well
as stepping through the world of MySQL—the most popular query language used
to interact with information in a database.
Finally, this book will tackle some nifty approaches to refining, testing, and deploying
your code. While these concepts are somewhat advanced, thorough explanations
will be provided. A familiarity with command line interfaces and their associated
vocabularies will be of assistance in these chapters.
DOWNLOAD FILE ON MEDIAFIRE
http://adf.ly/1ehPil
0 comments:
Post a Comment