What you need for this book

The main prerequisites for most of this book are a PHP 5.6+ interpreter and any text editor.

We’ll use the Composer (https://getcomposer.org/) tool to install all external dependencies in our examples. Some basic knowledge of Composer and PHPUnit is helpful but not absolutely necessary.

In later chapters, we’ll also use the pthreads PHP extension, which requires PHP 7 or above and the Gearman job server; both should be available for all platforms.

Also, some basic knowledge of the Unix environment (sockets, processes, signals, and so on) is helpful.