Email the Author

About the Book

"You will breeze through your code like the wind. It will be autoloaded, dependency-injected, unit-tested, layer-separated, and front-controlled."

Is your legacy PHP application composed of page scripts placed directly in the document root of the web server? Do your page scripts, along with any other classes and functions, combine the concerns of model, view, and controller into the same scope? Is the majority of the logical flow incorporated as include files and global functions rather than class methods? If so, you already know that the wide use of global variables means that making a change in one place leads to unexpected consequences somewhere else. These and other factors make it overly difficult and expensive for you to add features and fix bugs. Working with this legacy application feels like dragging your feet through mud.

But it doesn't have to be that way! This book will show you how to modernize your application by extracting and replacing its legacy artifacts. We will use a step-by-step approach, moving slowly and methodically, to improve your application from the ground up. Moreover, we will keep your application running the whole time. Each completed step in the process will keep your codebase fully operational with higher quality. When we are done, you will be able to breeze through your code like the wind. Your code will be autoloaded, dependency-injected, unit-tested, layer-separated, and front-controlled.

Please note that this book is about modernizing in terms of practice and technique, and not in terms of tools. We are not going to discuss the latest, hottest frameworks or libraries. With the exception of testing systems like PHPUnit, and one or two standalone third-party libraries, the book does not advocate adding third-party code to your existing legacy application. Most of the very limited code we do add to your application is specific to this book. We will be improving ourselves as programmers, as well as improving the quality of our legacy application.

If you feel overwhelmed by a legacy application, "Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP" is the book for you. If you prefer a paper copy, you can purchase one at Amazon.com.

If you're still on the fence, the video "It Was Like That When I Got Here" (embedded above on this page) outlines the first few chapters for free, and you can read some reviews of the book on the feedback page. You can also read the 4.5-star review from SitePoint.

Be sure to follow the book on Twitter @mlaphp, and tell all your friends!

About the Author

Paul M. Jones

@pmjones

Paul M. Jones is an internationally recognized PHP expert who has worked as everything from junior developer to VP of Engineering in all kinds of organizations (corporate, military, non-profit, educational, medical, and others). Paul's latest open-source project is the Atlas Persistence Framework for PHP. Among his other accomplishments, Paul is the lead developer on Aura for PHP and Solar Framework, and the creator of the Savant template system. He has authored a series of authoritative benchmarks on dynamic framework performance, and was a founding contributor to the Zend Framework (the DB, DB_Table, and View components). Paul was a founding member of the PHP Framework Interoperability Group, where he shepherded the PSR-1 and PSR-2 recommendations, and was the primary author on the PSR-4 autoloader recommendation. He was also a member of the Zend PHP 5.3 Certification education advisory board. He blogs at paul-m-jones.com. In a previous career, Paul was an operations intelligence specialist for the US Air Force, and enjoys putting .308 holes in targets at 400 yards.