Looking for a print edition? It's available on Lulu.

"Future me will appreciate it if I apply even just half of the recipes in this fantastic book. I learnt something new from every chapter and I can't wait to share some of these methods with my teams." Andrew Barlow

"Another excellent book from Matthias Noback! I learned a lot about techniques how to decouple your application from frameworks, test suites and other libraries. And the best part: it showed me how to unleash the power of PHPStan with custom rules to make sure you stay decoupled." Stefan Blanke

Software is never done. The world around your program changes faster than you want it to. Frameworks and libraries are abandoned and replaced with something better (or just something new), so you need to migrate. You can postpone this work for a bit, but eventually you'll have to catch up, or your project may end up hopelessly outdated. I'm sure you know one or two of those projects!

How can you make all of this easier for yourself and the future maintainers of the project? The keyword is "decoupling". You can change the design of your code to defend it against changes in any dependency your project relies on. Decoupling your code is a way to make it future-proof (without doing too much work that "you ain't gonna need").

About 10 years ago I started looking for ways to decouple my code, but at first I struggled to do it effectively. My code was decoupled in the wrong places, or in the wrong way. I got a better view on this topic after several intense experiences with some legacy projects, a big framework migration, and a complete project rewrite (that I'm sure could have been prevented). I've collected many recipes for decoupling along the way. This book gives you a practical overview of common situations that suffer from an often unintended high level of coupling in web applications. Of course, it also gives you step-by-step recipes to improve these situations. The examples in this book show you how to decouple from your web framework, templating engine, test framework, ORM, and so on.

Decoupling is one thing, but staying decoupled is something else entirely. That's why in this book we focus on how to solidify the decoupling rules with PHPStan, the automated static analysis tool for PHP. That way we don't have to rely on discipline and code reviews, but can let a tool point out possible coupling mistakes.

"Have you ever wondered how to efficiently decouple from your PHP framework? And how to enforce it through tooling? I did! And Recipes For Decoupling delivered me very well thought out explanations, examples and snippets for decoupling. It even explains step by step how to enforce these decoupling rules through PHPStan rules. The book contains examples from a variety of popular PHP frameworks including Symfony, Laravel, Mockery and PHPUnit." - Vincent Hagen

"'Decoupling' is a delightful read that merits a slow read because you will want to stop and code after every chapter! Noback’s clarity and honesty is welcome in an era of big personalities, as is his ability to distill framework concepts to elegant code." - Matthew Gatner

Looking for a print edition? It's available on Lulu.

"A practical guide on providing you a breakthrough in your architectural skills to build web applications in an adaptive & sustainable manner." -- Mohammad Emran Hasan

Web applications deserve to outlive the currently fashionable framework. Your application's core use cases deserve to be decoupled from their surrounding infrastructure. And all of your domain-specific code needs to be testable; it has to be tested after all.

This book helps you get your web applications back in shape. It contains many techniques for decoupling from infrastructure (like the framework, the database, or remote web services). In Part 1 we unlock a collection of design patterns which help you establish a clean separation between core and infrastructure code. Part 2 shows how these design patterns resonate at a higher level with architectural concepts like layers, ports and adapters (a.k.a. Hexagonal architecture). The book finishes with a discussion of testing strategies and design trade-offs.

What you'll learn

• Separating mixed code into core and infrastructure code by refactoring into patterns
• Dividing your code into layers, and making a clear distinction between an application's ports and adapters
• Testing decoupled applications

Each chapter comes with exercises to test your understanding.

This is a book for experienced web developers. Code samples are written in PHP and are easy to follow by developers who write code in other OOP dialects, like C#, Java, etc.

"The best guide that brings your coding and architecture skills a level up. All the modern PHP features combined with the elegance of a well designed modular design." -- José María Valera Reales

There is an accompanying real-world project that showcases the design techniques and principles explained in this book. For a one-time fee you get access to this project, including any future updates. Subscribe at https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/matthiasnoback/read-with-the-author.

"The author achieves what most others don't - making the core idea so simple that it is near impossible for the reader to get wrong. The only architecture book I would recommend even to my junior colleagues." -- Ondřej Bouda