5. Fin
Thank you for taking the time to read through my free sample. I hope that you found it interesting enough to go on and purchase the book itself.
With the rest of the book, you’ll encounter more of the same kind of thinking. Some of it you will already be familiar with. Other parts, you won’t. Some of the ideas that I present in the coming chapters are controversial. Others are simply the kind of things that any PHP developer worth his salt should know.
You might have noticed that this book isn’t a straight up “How To”. Even when a chapter starts with the most basic introduction, it isn’t the goal of that chapter to present a linear tutorial that ends with a working solution. Rather, I present each concept as more of a sight-seeing tour. When you reach a certain level of ability with your coding, being able to see the wood and the trees at the same time is a much more valuable quality than being able to recall a straight-up tutorial.
This idea is what underpins the notion of PHP Brilliance: The ability to take a more holistic view of the programming problems before us, in recognition of the fact that so many programming topics are knitted together, interlinked, inter-dependent. Encapsulation forms part of the consideration surrounding the Single Responsibility Principle, which in turn is one of the SOLID principles, which contains the Liskov Substitution Principle, which in itself has a direct bearing on abstraction, inheritance, and the notion of programming to an interface rather than an implementation.
The concepts that lead to high quality, enterprise grade application development simply cannot be boxed up into self-contained units.
But let’s cut to the quick. When a developer achieves a comfortable mastery of the topics that are covered in this book, she becomes a much more valuable employee. When I interview developers for positions on project teams, the one that knows this stuff is the one most likely to be offered the job. In effect, it’s like a wishlist of the knowledge that I hope my next interview candidate will have.
The reason for this is relatively simple. I’ve constructed this book to be representative of the knowledge that I believe all senior developers and above should be comfortable with. If you’re applying for a top level technical position and you’re comfortable with all of this, you’re already ahead of the pack.
In case you might be interested, here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of the topics included within the book.
- The four central tenets: a fresh look at encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance and polymorphism.
- Interfaces, namespaces, traits and closures
- Loose coupling and dependency injection
- Programming principles, patterns and anti-patterns
- The five SOLID principles
- Dependency Injection Containers and super factories.
- Architectural concerns: MVC and its siblings, Service oriented architecture, APIs and Microservices, the Architectural Fortress and other architectural designs
- What’s new in PHP7 and how we can use it to excel.
Thank you again for taking the time to read this far.
Thunder