Learning PHP 7

by Antonio Lopez

PHP is a great language for building web applications. It is essentially a server-side scripting language that is also used for general purpose programming. PHP 7 is the latest version with a host of new features, and it provides major backwards-compatibility breaks.

This book begins with the fundamentals of PHP programming by covering the basic concepts such as variables, functions, class, and objects. You will set up PHP server on your machine and learn to read and write procedural PHP code. After getting an understanding of OOP as a paradigm, you will execute MySQL queries on your database. Moving on, you will find out how to use MVC to create applications from scratch and add tests. Then, you will build REST APIs and perform behavioral tests on your applications.

By the end of the book, you will have the skills required to read and write files, debug, test, and work with MySQL.

Genres: Technology

393 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 29, 2016

About the author

Antonio Lopez is a software engineer with more than 7 years of experience. He has worked with PHP since university, which was 10 years ago, building small personal projects. Later, Antonio started his journey around Europe, working in Barcelona, London, Dublin, and back in Barcelona. He has worked in a number of different areas, from web applications to REST APIs and internal tools. Antonio likes to spend his spare time on personal projects and start-ups and has a strong vocation in education and teaching.

Reviews

[Nick Bair · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is terrible. There are a lot of consistency issues. Some of those include sections where the same code is referred to multiple times but the code is slightly different in each reference. So maybe the variable names are not the same or the function was slightly different. Some other consistency issues include areas where the author will explain where a certain file should be created in the folder structure but then in other instances does not explain at all where the file is intended to live. The app.json config file is a prime example of that. The author treats the routes.json file the same way. You will spend a lot of time troubleshooting code to fix what the author has left out. There are also several sections of code missing semi colons on certain lines.

[Lime Street Labrador · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is apparently a poorly organized, planned, and edited book.
Chapter 1-2 are introductory and how-to-install chitchats.
Chapter 3-4 are basics of basics about PHP syntax, like what are variables, arrays, if-elseif-else, for-loop, etc., followed by object syntax like what is a class, _construct, interface, etc.
Chapter 5 is another syntax dump for MySQL, like what is SELECT, UPDATE, JOIN, etc.
So Chapter 1-5 are very basic stuff that most beginners already know.
And then suddenly comes Chapter 6 on MVC, where he discusses (or attempts to) the MVC pattern and how to use PHP to create the components like routers, controllers, models, etc. While the idea is very good and supposedly educational, the sudden jump of contents is very confusing; and the poorly written (edited) explanations are not helpful. There are paragraphs on things that I already know that I cannot understand, making it hopeless to learn new and more advanced items from this book.
Having said that, I will re-visit Chapter 6 codes to salvage some value after I learn the concepts from other sources.

[Saman · Rating 5 out of 5]

reasonably comprehensive.
the book avoids getting into much unneceesary details. it helps with getting the reader familiar with modern developing technics and patterns.