Object-Oriented PHP

Chapter 10. IMPROVEMENT THROUGH INHERITANCE

Anyone who has played Monopoly knows that a player's financial situation can be improved through inheritance. In object-oriented programming (OOP), inheritance can also bring improvement. In this chapter we'll use inheritance to improve the MySQL classes developed in Chapter 9, by simplifying error trapping and by modifying the behavior of the MySQLResultSet class.

Trapping errors is not a job that developers approach with enthusiasm. It is tedious and a distraction from the task at hand. No one sets out to write error-handling code; it is a necessary evil. Not only that, error trapping is ugly. It clutters up well-written code and often ends up obscuring what was initially readable. Further, it's ...