In this new tutorial on DevShed they take a look at a feature added in PHP5 to help makes developers' lives easier - magic functions. These magic functions (like __get and __set) can help you catch things a bit closer to the execution of the language than an if or other conditional could and to do some very fun things.

It's not breaking news that the release of PHP 5 drastically changed the way that many developers build their web-based programs. The incorporation of a much more robust object model, along with the introduction of native exceptions, type hinting and so forth (add your own improvement to the list) has given the language the maturity that we see in it today. This seven-part article series will explain an important new feature: magic functions.

This first part of the series looks at __get and __set and how to use them for property overloading in a class.