Advanced PHP Programming

Introduction. I. IMPLEMENTATION AND DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGIES. 1. Coding Styles. Choosing a Style That Is Right for You. Naming Symbols. Avoiding Confusing Code. Documentation. Further Reading. 2. Object-Oriented Programming through Design Patterns. Introduction to OO Programming. A Brief Introduction to Design Patterns. Overloading. Further Reading. 3. Error Handling. Handling Errors. Handling External Errors. Exceptions. When to Use Exceptions. Further Reading. 4. Implementing with PHP: Templates and the Web. Smarty. Writing Your Own Template Solution. Further Reading. 5. Implementing with PHP: Standalone Scripts. Introduction to the PHP Command-Line Interface (CLI). Handling Input/Output (I/O). Parsing Command-Line Arguments. Creating and Managing Child Processes. Writing Daemons. Combining What You've Learned: Monitoring. Services Further Reading. 6. Unit Testing. An Introduction to Unit Testing. Writing Inline and Out-of-Line Unit Tests. Additional Features in PHPUnit. Test-Driven Design. Unit Testing in a Web Environment. Further Reading. 7. Managing the Development Environment. Change Control. Managing Packaging. Further Reading. 8. Designing a Good API. Design for Refactoring and Extensibility. Defensive Coding. Further Reading. II. CACHING. 9. External Performance Tunings. Language-Level Tunings. Cache-Friendly PHP Applications. Content Compression. Further Reading. 10. Data Component Caching. Caching Issues. Recognizing Cacheable Data Components. Choosing the Right Strategy: Hand-Made or Prefab Classes. Output Buffering. In-Memory Caching. DBM-Based Caching. Shared Memory Caching. Cookie-Based Caching. Integrating Caching into Application Code. Further Reading. 11. Computational Reuse. Introduction by Example: Fibonacci Sequences. Caching Reused Data Inside a Request. Caching Reused Data Between Requests. Computational Reuse Inside PHP. Further Reading. III. DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS. 12. Interacting with Databases. Understanding How Databases and Queries

George Schlossnagle is a principal at OmniTI Computer Consulting, a Maryland-based tech company that specializes in high-volume Web and email systems. Before joining OmniTI, he led technical operations at several high-profile community Web sites, where he developed experience managing PHP in very large enterprise environments. He is a frequent contributor to the PHP community and his work can be found in the PHP core, as well as in the PEAR and PECL extension repositories. Before entering the information technology field, George trained to be a mathematician and served a two-year stint as a teacher in the Peace Corps. His experience has taught him to value an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving that favors root-cause analysis of problems over simply addressing symptoms.