Composer is at the epicenter of modern PHP, or PHP's renaissance. It has allowed PHP developers everywhere to transition from monolithic library collections to picking pieces and bits from various authors and build their own tools from these. It made importing these dependencies and keeping them up to date easier and maintainable.

As with any tool that gains traction it's been abused and misused along with all of the good aspects of it. This book is an attempt to share a ton of tricks and insider knowledge that is shared everywhere in conferences and bar tables. Composer is a young tool in alpha stage and suffers from a certain degree of "tribal knowledge" associated with its rapid growth. I will share these with you and keep this book up to date with the latest patches and PRs as well as recommendations from its core team.

The book will attempt to balance theory and practical aspects by providing many examples and recipes you can easily follow along and experiment with. All this content will be divided into two points of view, that of a Library Publisher and that of Library Consumers, since each of these offer unique challenges in dealing and managing your code.

Within "Composer for Library Publishers" we will look at many items important to the Composer ecosystem that will help all of us use it in its recommended format with the confidence of always having the right version, for this we will also explore Semantic Versioning and tagging to quite some extent. 

From "Composer for Library Consumers" we will ponder how composer fits into your team's development cycle and how to deal with security concerns, updates and deployments. Debugging and troubleshooting big projects will also be covered to allow your team to get over the humps and into a productive flow.

If you are using Composer and wondering if you are doing it the right way, this book is for you. It will guide you and show you some features little known in the community and a how to wield their strength. If you are not using Composer, then this book will try to guide you into it and get you using its best practices right off the bat.

I hope this is very useful to all of you out there.