Rector is an extremely powerful tool that can instantly improve the code quality of your PHP projects. It can be used to safely migrate projects from PHP 5.6 to PHP 8. It can help you establish a standard of robust programming practices in your project. And it can save you a lot of time spent on reviewing pull requests.

In this book, seasoned developers Matthias Noback and Tomas Votruba give you all the information you need to become a Rector power user. You'll learn:

• How to make Rector part of your daily development workflow
• How to create Rector rules that replace repetitive manual refactoring work
• How to automate even more with Rector by adding it to your project's build process

Tomas, being the founding father and core maintainer of the Rector project, will shine his light on:

• What's the place of Rector in the larger ecosystem of PHP tools for code quality assurance?
• What role will Rector fulfill in the future?

Matthias, who has a strong focus on automated testing, will cover:

• The concepts behind Rector: tokenizing, parsing, and manipulating PHP AST nodes
• Test-driven development techniques for creating automated refactorings

What readers say

"I've been following Rector for a couple of years now. I've been very excited by the claims and demos but try as I might to get an understanding and a usable knowledge I just couldn't... until the book. Now within the space of a few days I have started to integrate Rector into a 20-year-old project (with a couple million lines of code) at work. My commits have increased, I have been able to find way more problems early on in code reviews, and I have started to clean up a lot of legacy spaghetti code.

Many thanks for the book, it has really really.... REALLY helped!"

-- Steve Hyde

"Grabbed my copy. This was an absolute nobrainer.

(one day later)

I already read through the whole thing. Nice work. Next step is to create some rules"

-- @psren

"The book is easy to read in a complex subject to me. Congrats both on your excellent work!!"

-- @KPikaza

"18 years ago, I bought my first technical book ever PHP 4 Bible. To master how to automatically refactor code using the same language on which it is written is something I could've not foreseen back then."

-- Oscar Nevarez

"I read most of the book already. Learned lots about the abstract syntax tree and how to create and test Rector rules. I can recommend any PHP developer to read this book!"

-- Tijmen Wierenga

"Purchased! My mind is already buzzing with ideas on how to use this on a legacy PHP project I just took over."

-- Joel Clermont