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Hi, Larry i am sorry about all these questions but i need to ask you?

 

I am working through Effortless E-ccomerce book now as you know to work out how the MVC model works. But i would really like to get into the Object Orientated Programming so i can work with frameworks etc, i would like to know is your PHP Advanced book ideal for learning this stuff? I got inspiration from your loyal member Jonathon noticing he was working with the Yii framework and using OOP code. Or is there another way we should go about learning this OOP stuff, what do you suggest?

 

I am planning to put my order in at Amazon.com this week to get

 

PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide (4th Edition)

 

PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide (4th Edition)

 

PHP 5 Advanced: Visual QuickPro Guide

 

MySQL, Second Edition

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Hello Edward,

 

Thanks for the interest in the books. To be clear, the books would go in this order, in terms of user level:

PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide (4th Edition)

PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide (4th Edition)

PHP 5 Advanced: Visual QuickPro Guide

 

The Visual QuickStart Guide is for true beginners, which you would not be. The MySQL book covers MySQL and advanced SQL in more detail. The PHP 5 Advanced book does teach OOP.

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Thanks I will put my order in at amazon for these. I would like to get the first PHP book also, as I have some other authors book but I like the way you break into topics and explain them. It will be a reference guide for me.

 

I have a book on php with OOP, I did read the quick start guide but then after in the book was mainly about the php 5 OOP library and functions. There is lack of example on how to adapt in the real life situation.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Edward: oop is hard to understand in the beginnig. I struggled alot myselves, and you got to really study the code and read the explanations several times. This is not something understood in an hour.

 

I would recommend you to Get object-oriented solutions by david powels (might not remember his name correctly). That is the best explanation of oop php i've read. Larrys book, the advanced one, also comes highly recommended. It is not an oop book, but every php programmer need to know that stuff top. You cannot create good classes if you don't know the good advanced solutions. I really like his array and recurssion parts.

 

Sorry for any spelling mistakes. My iPhone wants me to write norwegian...

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Thanks I have family in Oslo to. I just got object orientated solutions in today by David Powers and PHP Ojects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra but not sure which one is best to read yet. I worked through a bit of the Object-Orientated with PHP 5 by Hasin Hayder a few months back but that book seemed to go on more about the php library to support oop. I am also working on Yii framework, I am aware it's not easy but Yii actually helps you to see where it is useful by extending their classes. You are right it seems to be difficult to learn oop and know how to use it for the bigger website.

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Thanks Jonoathon, I am going to take your advise and start of with this one, it certainly does look easier to follow. Have you finished both of the David Powers and Matt Zandstra books. How about writing oop design patterns into your own site did you find those books provided enough info to get started?

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Yes, OOP isn't syntactically difficult in my opinion, but it is difficult in how to organise and plan for the classes. It requires a lot of logic and forward thinking about how the classes should be used extended or abstracted etc. It's something a book can't really teach, it's something you need to discover through guidance.

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Jonathon is right: You might read the first few chapters of Zandstras book, but it is way more advanced than Powers'. You should really understand what Powers do before you take a close look at Zandstras book. I'm not digging Zandstras writing style, as he makes pretty basic things like Exceptions hard to understand. Therefor, wait with it, or read it but don't expect to understand everything straight away.

 

As to patterns and such things, Zandstra is definitely a very good read. Please note that patterns are not like "the holy grail" or something that supersedes everything. Patterns are for solving common programming difficulties. You should be sure you need a pattern before deploying it.

 

The book "Design Patterns" by Christoffer G. Lasater is also very good. I'm not done with it, but he explains hard-to-grasp patterns relatively easily, just like Larry is an expert on. The book is for Java, but for this kind of code, you won't have any problems understanding it or using it in a PHP-context. PHP and Java are very similar.

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  • 2 months later...

Jonathon is right: You might read the first few chapters of Zandstras book, but it is way more advanced than Powers'. You should really understand what Powers do before you take a close look at Zandstras book. I'm not digging Zandstras writing style, as he makes pretty basic things like Exceptions hard to understand. Therefor, wait with it, or read it but don't expect to understand everything straight away.

 

As to patterns and such things, Zandstra is definitely a very good read. Please note that patterns are not like "the holy grail" or something that supersedes everything. Patterns are for solving common programming difficulties. You should be sure you need a pattern before deploying it.

 

The book "Design Patterns" by Christoffer G. Lasater is also very good. I'm not done with it, but he explains hard-to-grasp patterns relatively easily, just like Larry is an expert on. The book is for Java, but for this kind of code, you won't have any problems understanding it or using it in a PHP-context. PHP and Java are very similar.

 

Hey Antonio, I'm about to make my purchase on Amazon today for the new Larry's Javascript book and also these design patterns book you are recommending "Design Patterns" by Christoffer G. Is there anything else you recommend i get before i put my order in? I'm also going to order The Walking Dead "Robert Kirkman" comics books to see what they are like while waiting for Season 3 to start in the fall.

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Wow! You read the Walking Dead comics too? Very cool. :D

 

Just remember to actually write some code, ok? You need to grow along these books as you won't understand everything at once. You need to make some errors, correct them, read some more, then go back an improve upon you own code.

 

Larry's JS book is awesome. I like it a lot and I would recommend it to anyone asking for a JS book. Buy it.

 

About the "Design Patterns" book: This is an advanced book that will teach you coding principles, not so much the actual code. Even though Lasater explains a lot of the patterns in a good way, they are often advanced concepts. You should understand what things like class diagrams, class hierarchies, abstraction and types to get your money's worth. If you are curious about patterns, search a little bit on google for common pattern names and watch some youtube guides first. If you get some of them, I would say It's ok to buy it.

 

I like this users videos a lot as he's quite good at making it interesting. Watch some videos before you buy this one at least. He also introduces general OOP here.

 

http://www.youtube.c...ser/JREAMdesign

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I am ordering the comics because the TV series is based on them, so want to give them a read to compare, awesome series. What i am surprised about is how Rick Crimes "Andrew Lincoln" main actor is from England but can but that cool american country cowboy accent on, just seems strange why America is such a big country but they picked him. Characters are and so in the series are supposed to resemble the comic book characters.

 

I have been writing code Antonio, i done most of my practice in the David Powers OOP book first section, but now i paused on that book after section 1 to get the Larry PHP and MySQL book done, i am also doing review and persue sections in there all the questions and exercises. Last week i wrote the biggest sticky forum i have ever done with all the inputs in, it was fun and i got it all to work 100%. I do want to do my study in the correct order, After the book i am on now i will go onto finish the Coffee shop in Effortless E-commerce. I noticed that Larry is changing the Advanced PHP book, so i may do some other books until this one comes out, maybe go back to finish David powers, that new book Larry he has coming out is awesome, its stages you up for the frameworks, and i saw he will have introduction to Zend Framework. I am going to learn Yii, because i believe it to be better than the other frameworks, and you can also incorporate Zend framework into it, it also handles jquery, which code ignitor does not do as well. There was some people at Rackspace that supported me on the fact that Yii was the right way to be going.

 

I am getting the Javascript book, i have worked through say 1.5 books on it already, i am not sure when i am going to study that book right now, the problem is i have learned some stuff then forgotten it, so that's why i was concerned with the order i was learning in so i can pull all together at once, let alone css and html, css which is tough. I want to make a multiple user E-commerce site, a German programmer told me to look more closely at factory patterns. Its difficult to really discuss design patterns at this point, i will need to finish Larry's books and the Yii books and those design patterns books, plan my databases and write down all the site functionality and then start to figure out which ones to use.

 

I actually wanted to say looking at the design pattern books available, i think matt zandstra maybe the best one, because he has examples and also shows those patterns in practice and with PHP. I didn't have a problem understanding all the stuff in his book. I come from a background of higher Maths, so i understand well algebra and manipulation of variables, which seems to be the most part of coding.

 

Ive checked out some of JREAMdesign video's before, i saw some design patterns video's on Youtube but unfortunately i find the Indian accents very frustrating. I like this one of building a basic MVC by Johny White:

 

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Thanks Edward for starting this discussion and to Jonathan and Antonio for their contributions. I've just started on the David Powers book and so far found it very good. and I now better understand how Antonio's class, UserGenerator works!

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Jonathon is right: You might read the first few chapters of Zandstras book, but it is way more advanced than Powers'. You should really understand what Powers do before you take a close look at Zandstras book. I'm not digging Zandstras writing style, as he makes pretty basic things like Exceptions hard to understand. Therefor, wait with it, or read it but don't expect to understand everything straight away.

 

As to patterns and such things, Zandstra is definitely a very good read. Please note that patterns are not like "the holy grail" or something that supersedes everything. Patterns are for solving common programming difficulties. You should be sure you need a pattern before deploying it.

 

The book "Design Patterns" by Christoffer G. Lasater is also very good. I'm not done with it, but he explains hard-to-grasp patterns relatively easily, just like Larry is an expert on. The book is for Java, but for this kind of code, you won't have any problems understanding it or using it in a PHP-context. PHP and Java are very similar.

 

I got Design Patterns Christopher G. Lasater, its a neat little book, at least the examples are more approachable, with matt's book it was hard to even understand what he was talking about let alone the design patterns, he has his way of over complicating things. I am going to make like a sample version of my site just for fun like Larry advised me to do, then later scrap it to rebuild. I am in the middle of the Larry Php and Mysql for dynamic website's book, i must say the middle of the book is tough. I was surprised at how much SQL could actually do and now i can see that with a databased website that most of the logical coding will be done at the SQL level before it even hits php. Inner and outer joins can get a bit confusing towards the end of the section, its the hardest stuff ive ever done out of any book ive done so far with regards to this stuff, even the OOP stuff i done was easier.

 

Are you not interested in using the Yii framework? It's really pretty cool and it's actually interesting to see that in Effortless Ecommerce Larry was using those function's to generate the html via the php, and now Yii already has all the stuff setup with the CHTML stuff.

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  • 1 month later...

I just read the 2nd edition of The Object Oriented Thought Process by Matt Weisfeld and found it to be just okay. A lot of redundancy, which is easy enough to do with OOP. I thought some of the subjects covered were odd, as was the order. Not sure if the third edition is better in those regards.

 

Haven't read the PHP in Action, but I have liked a couple of the "In Action" books. In fact, my JavaScript book was going to be "JavaScript in Action"!

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I have the same edition. Some of the end chapters are different and do seem out of place with the rest of the book. I read the book when I had no understanding of OOP and was struggling to understand it all. There was no book available from Larry Ullman on the subject at the time. You were still planning the PHP5 Advanced book at the time. And hopefully the next edition will be your best yet! really looking forward to that one actually.

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