PHP in Action

To keep programming productive and enjoyable, state-of-the-art practices and principles are essential. Object-oriented programming and design help manage complexity by keeping components cleanly separated. Unit testing helps prevent endless, exhausting debugging sessions. Refactoring keeps code supple and readable. PHP offers all this, and more.

PHP in Action shows you how to apply PHP techniques and principles to all the most common challenges of web programming, including:

• Web presentation and templates
• User interaction including the Model-View-Contoller architecture
• Input validation and form handling
• Database connection and querying and abstraction
• Object persistence

This book takes on the most important challenges of web programming in PHP 5 using state-of-the art programming and software design techniques including unit testing, refactoring and design patterns. It provides the essential skills you need for developing or maintaining complex to moderately complex PHP web applications.

• Explanation of software engineering principles of design and architecture of web programming
• How to refactor / redesign / restructure legacy applications
• Improve existing code incrementally and under time constraints
• How to use automated testing
• How to keep web applications secure
• Many interesting and useful examples

Dagfinn Reiersøl has been designing and developing web applications, web content mining software, web programming tools, and text analysis programs, mostly in PHP, since 1997. He also has a long history as a technical writer of software manuals. He lives in Oslo, Norway.

Marcus Baker has been a software consultant for many years specializing in OO design and development as well as web application development and testing. He is also a columnist for PHP Architecture Magazine and lives in London, England.

Chris Shiflett is a PHP consultant and security expert as well as a leader in the PHP community. He is the founder of the PHP Security Consortium and the author of the HTTP Developer¹s Handbook and Essential PHP Security. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.