Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL® and Apache All in One

Q&A

Q1:

Do I have to understand object-oriented programming to become a good PHP programmer, or even to finish this book?

A1:

Not at all. In fact, the vast majority of this book does not contain object-oriented (OO) programming! Object-oriented programming is an organizational approach that is intended to improve the reusability and extensibility of the code that makes up a given application. You might not know enough about your project in the beginning stages of development to fully plan for an OO design. When it is complete—or, at least, approaching a solid state—you might start to see areas in which an OO approach can be taken, and you might start to combine your code into classes, properties, and methods. But for the most part, simple scripts ...