Professional PHP Design Patterns

Introduction

PHP is mainstream. Wherever you look, you will see PHP meet-ups, job openings, and major companies using this open source language to support their business. An open source language with such humble beginnings is now heavily rooted in the enterprise world. PHP is brushing shoulders with the "the big kids" now—the enterprise-level languages with support from companies like IBM and Microsoft. This friendly confluence brings in new blood and new ideas. One of the most notable new pushes is to develop PHP applications in a more robust, scalable, businessworthy deployment. Programmers who have been around much longer than PHP have introduced great concepts to the PHP audience along these lines. In this book, the focus is on one major concept: Design Patterns.

Who This Book Is For

When determining a target audience for this book, I had to make some difficult decisions. Should I write for the beginning coder who is just learning PHP and its features and concepts, or should I focus more on the programmers with many years of experience? Should any assumptions be made about the level of expertise the reader has with PHP's object-oriented features? Do I need to continue to include support for PHP4? (It may be easy to answer that last question: "No, PHP4 is no longer supported." However, considering that it is still deployed in the wild, with developers still tasked to create new functionality, the answer isn't so easily decided.) In order for the book to reach the widest audience ...