Preface

PHP 7 has taken the open source community by storm, breaking records for speed, which is, metaphorically, causing heads to turn. In its most fundamental sense, the core engineering team has effected a major rewrite of the language but has still managed to maintain backward compatibility to a high degree. The impact of these internal changes is outwardly manifested in an almost 200% increase in speed, with significant savings in memory usage. From a development perspective, changes in how commands are parsed along with a uniform variable syntax have introduced new ways to write code which were simply not possible in the earlier versions of PHP. By the same token, any developer who is unaware of how commands are interpreted in PHP 7 can fall into unseen traps, which causes the code to malfunction. Accordingly, the mandate of this book is to illustrate new and exciting ways to write code and to point out any areas of incompatibility with previous versions of PHP. It is also important to note that this book addresses both PHP 7.0 and 7.1.