Professional PHP5 (PDF)

What is this book about?
With the release of PHP 5 and the Zend Engine 2, PHP finallygraduates from it earliest days as a lightweight scripting syntaxto an powerful object oriented programming language that can holdits own against the Java and.NET architectures that currentlydominate corporate software development. This book has a pragmaticfocus on how to use PHP in the larger scheme of enterprise-classsoftware development.
What does this book cover?
Unlike Java or.NET, there is little discussion of theapplication of design patterns, component architectures, andbest-practices to the development of applications using PHP.Software written in the absence of this sort of higher-orderarchitecture will never be able to match the robust frameworks thatJava and.NET ship with out of the box. This book addresses thisissue by covering the following material:

* Part 1 discusses the OO concepts that were initiallyexplored in Beginning PHP 5 and a demonstration of how toimplement them in PHP 5. This section also covers UML modeling andprovides a brief introduction to project management techniques thatare covered in more depth in Part 4.
* Parts 2 and 3 present objects and object hierarchiesthat, when completed, comprise a robust toolkit that developerswill be able to reuse on future projects. These chapters aredesigned to arm the professional PHP developer with the sort ofconstructs that are available out of the box with platforms such asJava and.NET -- from simple utility classes likeCollection and Iterator, to more complex constructs likeModel/View/Controller architectures and state machines.
* Part 4 shows how to use the toolkit from Parts 2 and 3to create real-world applications. We look at the development of arobust contact management system that will leverage the componentryand concepts already discussed and introduce project management andsoftware architecture concepts that enable developers to accuratelyidentify business requirements, design scalable, extensibleplatforms, and handle change management effectively. It covers thewaterfall and spiral project management paradigms and include adiscussion on eXtreme Programming and other approaches to softwaredevelopment.
* The Appendices include an extended discussion on theeffective use of CVS, introduce the Zend Studio IDE and relatedtools, and discuss performance tuning and scalability.