Modern PHP

PHP, they say, is undergoing a renaissance. Lockhart, like many, argues that this is because Facebook created their hack "dialect" of PHP and the Hip Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM) as a competitor to Zend, the only engine that had run PHP up to that point. It's been two years now since Facebook dropped their bomb. Since then PHP has gotten a language spec, PHP Standards Recommendations (PSRs), dropped the perpetually delayed version 6, and is in the process of releasing version 7, which incorporates many of hack's improvements. PHP remains in the top four languages tagged on Stack Overflow.

Lockhart outlines these changes and more his Modern PHP: from namespaces to multiple inheritance via traits to closures to PSRs 1 through 4 to components to the usual good practices that web programmers should use. After covering these aspects of the language, Lockhart moves on to common practice in the usage of the language, from setting up webservers to tuning to git deployment to testing with PHPUnit to becoming involved in the wider PHP community.

No doubt many, like me, have picked up quite a few of these things being active and curious PHP programmers over the past couple years. I certainly missed a few though, and it was nice to see the wisdom of the others affirmed in an O'Reilly book. Yes, I know it's a bit silly, but those animal-covered tomes have guided me since I started programming in the late nineties.