To get the most out of this book
This is a book for PHP developers, and the main thing that you need is a way to write and run PHP code. For editing, modern development practices have very much embraced the IDE as an essential tool. Popular IDEs include PhpStorm and NetBeans. You may choose to use a more lightweight code editor, such as VSCode or Sublime Text, if you prefer.
You will need to be able to run PHP 8 code on the command line, and if you want to run the last chapter, then you will need PHP 8.1 as well. Installing PHP is beyond the scope of this book and is dependent on your specific operating system or virtualization technology.
Practically all code samples in this book (excluding very minor snippets) are included in the public Git repository available on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/The-Art-of-Modern-PHP-8. You are strongly encouraged to clone or download all this code so that you can load it in your IDE, run it, and generally play around with it.
If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book's GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.
