Preface


I've had the great pleasure of seeing PHP grow; from a somewhat amateur, and often mocked, language that exploded in popularity, punching way above its weight and powering huge swathes of the burgeoning web into a modern and highly performant language that is often used to power large-scale enterprise systems.

With the release of PHP 8, and the upcoming (at the time of writing) release of PHP 8.1, we can really see a bright future for PHP.

You will first read about object-oriented programming (OOP) in PHP, starting with the basics and then going on to more advanced topics. You will work through modern programming techniques, such as inheritance, contrasting this with composition, and finally looking at more advanced language features. You will learn about the MVC pattern by building your own toy MVC system. In addition to this, you'll explore what a dependency injection (DI) container does by building a toy DI container. Later chapters will give you an overview of Composer and will explain how to create reusable PHP packages with it. You'll also find techniques to deploy these packages effectively so that other developers can use them.

By the end of this PHP book, you will have gained a rounded understanding of some of the fundamentals of modern PHP and will have the grounding you need to be able to update your code.