My current read – PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice

A quick background of my web development expierience:

I started out as an ASP/VBScript developer. My first project was a small work order application for a computer shop where I worked. In 2001, I moved to the Twin Cities to work on a project my dad and I had started. It was a web based camera solution and the web application was written using ASP/VBScript.

I had started to gain more interest in open source technologies. One that interest me the most was the combination of Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP/WAMP). PHP just clicked with me. I really enjoyed the built-in functions (extensions) it came with. It just made life much easier. My first project with PHP was a simple site were I would add/edit/delete artists/albums on a site to a table in MySQL and then display those results. I was hooked! I soon converted the current ASP/Access camera web application to use PHP/MySQL.

After leaving the PHP job in 2003, I was hired as a Delphi developer. During this time, I started to dabble in some ASP.NET/C# and kept up with what I could in the PHP community. I’ve made small personal sites using ASP.NET and PHP over the past couple of years, but nothing outside of that.

During the past few months, I’ve felt that it was time to start reading up on the new object-orientated (OO) features in PHP 5.

After I finished reading Maximizing ASP.NET by Jeff Putz a couple of weeks ago, I went out searching for a good PHP OO book. I found PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra. This book has been a really good PHP refresher for me. I’m about halfway through the book and have really enjoyed it. This book covers not only the added OO features in PHP 5, but introduces design patterns with example PHP code. I would highly recommend checking out Design Patterns at Wikipedia. I knew nothing about design patterns until I started my current job a few years ago and it’s nice to see how they patterns could be applied to web applications.

I will give an update/review of the book when I am finished with it. So far, I would highly recommend it.

On another note, I would recommend the Maximizing ASP.NET book. For someone who needed a more fine tuned explanation of ASP.NET, this book covered it for me.