Summary

That brings us to the end of Part 3 of this book. We've covered a lot of ground in these three chapters and, of course, that means that we have not been able to have a really deep dive into some topics. However, I hope you have learned enough to understand some basic concepts and now know how to research and learn more about these topics.

We started by looking at technical debt and how you can avoid this by adopting clean code practices. We briefly touched upon some major topic areas of clean code and particularly the popular acronyms SOLID and DRY, as well KICK, which was purposely created for this book! We talked about naming things clearly and trying to write self-documenting code. We learned about the perils of cyclomatic complexity and the wonders of early returns as a proven method to reduce this. Immutability was the next topic, and we explored some of the perils of mutable classes when working with PHP's "by reference" object variables. The last...