Excellent Introduction to OOP in PHP

Object-Oriented PHP is an excellent tutorial of OOP. There are many books that cover OOP in general, but this one focuses entirely on PHP's implementation.

I particularly liked how Lavin focused on walkthroughs that are plausible examples of real world web development. I've programmed using and read about OOP before, and I've seen most of the pedestrian examples of objects--dogs, cats, cars, and people--but those are all things that can be tangibly observed. You can look at one or think of one and figure out how to create a class for it in OOP. However, programming never deals with anything like that. Your objects are going to be things that only exist in the realm of the computer, like a MySQL object, an object for constructing navigation, or resizing images. This practical approach makes OOP all that much more approachable: you will be able to observe the benefits of OOP immediately if you've programmed before.

Other Reviews

• Probably not the most time effective way to learn OO PHP
• RIA Developer
• Excellent Introduction to OOP in PHP
• Thorough, informative, and confusing!
• Worthwhile for developers going to OOP