What this book will cover

You may have already heard about software craftsmanship books, clean-code books, and so on. What is the difference between this book and other ones? Well, we realized when we are a neophyte in development and discovering new programming languages, or even getting into programming and source code for the first time, it may be hard to understand how to apply these principles you read about everywhere. Programming languages do not all offer the same features—some are evolving fast, while some are not evolving anymore. Notions and the way things are named in one language may not be valid in other languages. That is why this book focuses on clean code in PHP especially.

You will not have to think about how to implement these principles and rules in PHP, which is something less to remember when absorbing knowledge. You will find examples and tools applying directly to you, used in professional projects, and proven by the industry. This way, we can get straight to the important points we would like you to understand. You can put your knowledge into practice immediately while reading this book and as a result, learn faster. Additionally, you do not need 10+ years’ experience to understand what will be shown. Only basic knowledge of PHP is required to fully understand what will be exposed.

This book is a compilation of years of experience—years of practice in the field, faced with real problems that had to be solved according to technical constraints, functional constraints, and time and money constraints. This will not be yet another book full of utopian principles that cannot be applied in real life.

More than fitting directly to your environment by talking about PHP only, this book can be read in the order you want. It is divided into two distinct parts. The first one (which you are currently reading) will expose a bit of theory about what is clean code and what are basic principles of it, directly applied to the PHP language up to version 8.2, and so on. The second part will be focused on practical tools you can use to ensure you are following the right rules the correct way, setting up an environment and your integrated development environment (IDE) in order to be as efficient and clean as possible, and getting metrics on your code, automated testing, writing documentation, and more. This means you can skip parts, take them in the order you want, and learn at the speed you want.

You will not have to read the whole theoretical part before getting into practice—you can dive into tools and concrete examples right now. You can also focus on the first part before getting into the practical aspects in order to be sure you fully understand what will be explained later. It is up to you.