In raising the question about whether a specific programming language is agile I want to avoid exploring what makes a language agile, or comparing PHP with other languages. The intention here is not to associate PHP to agile as a natural relationship, as much as to try and understand if we can find the ingredients in the PHP world, for creating an agile environment.

He (Marcello Duarte) first defines agile development practices for those not familiar and talks about the tools that PHP has to offer that fit in with that goal. He notes that PHP fits in well with the goals of agile development in being both light and powerful.

The book does a decent job of covering the main OOP topics in PHP; as well as, touching upon some of the peripheral ones. Hayder devotes whole chapters to such topics as unit testing, design patterns, XML, SPL, and working with databases.

The review talks about the "Good", the "Bad" and the "Ugly" of the book ranging from the good code examples and the chapter on the SPL down to the flawed version of the Singleton used and the lack of commentary/explanations around the code.

"Do not use getters and setters" looks like a hastily advise, but its meaning is very important and it is "do not break encapsulation", which moves us to the question what the encapsulation is.

He notes that encapsulation is, in essence, hiding parts of the code away so that the user/other coders only see a little bit of the magic that happens. He argues that getters and setters are a valid part of the encapsulation process and that designing a good, easy to use system almost requires them.

On the old site, I started a series of tutorials named "PHP Application Design". I planned for at least three parts, and while I did publish the first two and wrote at least half of part three, I found myself out of time to make it to the finish. Still dedicated to writing reusable and extensible PHP code and spreading the knowledge, this is a restart of the series, renamed as simply "OO PHP"

In part one he looks at the basics of OOP (terms, defining properties/methods, autoload, exceptions, type hinting, etc) with some code examples sprinkled through out. Part two looks at the "boring OOP principles" like polymorphism, encapsulation and heuristics.

In short: a very good concise introduction to OOP. I'll be keeping this on my desk for a while. The language use is strange but the code examples and the spread of topics make up for that in spades. This book has a very broad scope, but is clear in the essentials. If you're looking for an introduction to Objected Oriented Programming in PHP, I'd recommend this one.

The review gets into a bit more detail on "The Good", "The Bad" and "The Ugly" of its contents including its intro to OOP in PHP (good), the assumption that OOP is better than other programming types (bad) and the poor structure of the book (the ugly).

I'm really excited for him, as I know he put a lot of work over the past several months learning Magento and writing the book. The biggest challenege was dealing with the underlying architecture changes that the Magento team applied in various versions leading up to (and including after!) the 1.0 release.

It's hard to hit a moving target like that, but as Michael mentions, the book and its authors did a great job of it.

The book as been officially released and can be purchased on the php|architect website in either a Print+PDF ($34.99 CAD) or just PDF ($29.99 CAD).

I've released my tutorial on Object Oriented PHP in Spanish. You can download the PDF. Many thanks to Javier W. Barbieri from Iquitos Peru.

Check out the KillerPHP.com site for more great tutorials - including videos - released to learning PHP.

Packt Publishing recently sent me a couple of books to review, so let's start with Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder. According to the introduction, the book is intended for beginners to intermediate PHP5 programmers and the first chapter has a good introduction to what object oriented programming is and why you would want to use it.

He glosses over the first few chapters of the book (introductory stuff mostly) and points out three others specifically - Chapter 5 covering reflection and unit testing, Chapter 6 covering the SPL and Chapter 9 dealing with SimpleXML and DOM.

Putting the aspects of Hayder's grasp of the English language aside, the book is rather good as an introduction to the various technologies that it covers.

He points out a few things of note - the beginner OOP chapters (only made for the newbies out there), the contents of the main OOP chapter and the good section on PHPUnit and unit testing. He also has a few suggestions of things that could make the book a bit better, including a personal suggestion on code formating and braces.

Sometimes I've seen people say PHP is a bad first language, because it teaches bad programming habits. But is this actually true at all? Often those who say that don't really like PHP themselves either, many times because of equally untrue reasons.

They argue both sides of the situation, mentioning what could make for a good first language, why PHP is a "nearly perfect" fit for it and some arguing points for the other side as to why PHP isn't the best option.