On the TutsPlus.com site, they've posted a tutorial for those wanting to get started with object-oriented programming (OOP) in PHP. In this introductory article they cover the basics of objects, classes and several over OOP-related topics.

In this article, we're going to explore the basics of object-oriented programming in PHP. We'll start with an introduction to classes and objects, and we'll discuss a couple of advanced concepts like inheritance and polymorphism in the latter half of this article.

The tutorial starts with the basics, explaining some of the key terms involved in OOP and how they can be manipulated. From there they include code examples of classes, making instances of them as objects and accessing properties and methods. With those basics out of the way, they move on to more advanced topics: encapsulation, inheritance and the basics of polymorphism.

Larry Garfield has posted a book review to his Steemit site giving his thoughts about the "Functional Programming in PHP" book from php[architect] press.

I was asked by php[architect] a while back to review "Functional Programming in PHP, 2nd Ed" by Simon Holywell. I've been sitting on this review for a while, so it's time to finally get it done.

He starts with some of the usual disclosures about receiving the book (for free), what the review is based on and that the opinions are his alone. He goes on to share some of his initial impressions of the book and whether he feels it's a good book to recommend to those wanting to start out with functional programming in PHP. He also points out that, while the book was published in 2016 the recommended PHP version even then was quite old (v5.4). He covers some of the topics that the book covers, noting that many of them, while interesting, don't add much to the overall book.

He does focus on one chapter and how, at the beginning, it showed promise but quickly moved towards using 3rd party libraries for more complex operations. He finishes the review by answering the question: "does this book make me care about functional programming in PHP?"

On the Laravel News site there's a tutorial posted that makes some suggestions about how to anticipate application failures by using effective unit testing.

When you start working on a new feature, it is wise to plan out not only how it is expected to work, but what happens if something fails. Taking the time up front to anticipate failure is a quality of a great developer.

[...] Since we don’t know when a dependency might fail, it’s best to plan for failure by having tests so we can be more confident in failed states. Laravel can help us write tests that plan for failure using real-time facades.

In their example, they create a simple "article" repository class that makes use of a HTTP client to fetch the information for each article (by ID). In this case the client is Guzzle. They then add a singleton to the configuration to fetch the API class and show how to implement it in a controller. With this structure, they then move on to testing for failure via real-time facades and mocking a Guzzle response using a "Client" facade instead of calling it directly.

On the KillerPHP.com site there's a new post that compares two popular languages - PHP and Python and tries to answer the question "Which one should I learn?"

One question I get often, is which programming language should you learn? I’ve been getting this question for years!

Things change in the programming world, languages come and go. But the good news is that the basics, the core concepts and techniques, are 90-95% the same in all the modern programming languages. [...] What that means, is that your programming language choice, isn’t nearly as critical as you’d think. Why? Well, once you know one programming language, it is easy as apple pie to switch to another!

He then gives some of his own thoughts about how you could decide which language you should pick including the kinds of programming (target result) and what kinds of jobs you can get with each.

On the StackOverflow blog there's an interesting post that looks at the differences in programming languages between countries based on their current state, either a developing country or a wealthy one (or somewhere in between).

Here at Stack Overflow, we’re interested in using our data to share insights about the worldwide software development community. [...] This leads us to wonder how else programming technologies may differ between rich and poor countries, and how that affects our picture of the global software development industry. In this post, we’ll explore these differences, and show that’s it’s useful to segment the software development industry into high-income countries and the rest of the world.

All the analyses explored here were performed on 2017 so far (January-August), on the 250 tags that had the most traffic during that time.

They investigated some of the major programming languages and platforms (including PHP) and found some interesting negative and positive correlation results. The post then covers how they split the list of countries in two (wealthy vs developing) and show results of the technologies they use. They include graphs for each of the points they make and link over to their StackOverflow Insights site where you can gather statistics for evaluation of your own.

On the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc has written up a post that talks about why a string is called a "string" going back through the history of the term and discovering its origins.

Why is a string called a string? Have you ever given this some thought? We never use such a word in contexts other than programming for a set of letters sticking together, and yet – in programming it’s as pervasive as the word “variable”. Why is that, and where does it come from?

To find out, we have to tackle some related terms first. History lesson time!

He starts with these related terms including "font", "uppercase" and "lowercase". He talks about the printing process and how the "stringing together" of the series of characters might have been how customers using the press were charged. He then shifts over to the academic world for background there relating to a series of numbers and letters used in decision problems. The term caught on and showed up in several other academic papers over the years ending up eventually in programming language definitions and examples.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted that introduces the idea of "Poka Yoke" - basically defensive programming - and how to apply it in your own development processes.

When working in a medium to large team on the same codebase, it can sometimes become hard to understand each other’s code and how to use it. [...] It can be quite hard to remember how particular classes were intended to work, both on their own and in combination with each other. At that point, it becomes easy to accidentally introduce side effects or bugs without realizing it.

These mistakes might get caught in quality assurance, but there’s a realistic chance they might slip through. And even if they get caught, it can take a lot of time to send the code back and get it fixed. So how can we prevent this? Enter “Poka Yoke”.

The article then introduces the basic ideas of "poka yoke" and the two main parts: mistake prevention and mistake detection. It then gets more practical and suggests some PHP-specific things that can be done to prevent mistakes such as:

• the use of type declarations
• using value objects
• making use of effective validation
• returning null objects

For each there's a brief explaination and some sample code to help make the example more practical.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted from author Marcello Duarte showing you how to use functional programming techniques in your applications with the help of the Phunkie library. Phunkie is a library that brings functional programming functionality to PHP. This article was originally published on the Inviqa blog.

In the first part of this series we explored parsers and combinators to help you start getting values from functional programming with PHP. We covered the basics using examples, and now we’ll move onto more sequencing and other strategies.

Continuing on, they work towards the goal of making a more useful end result, a JSON parser that returns a JsonObject. First, though, he goes through several different combinators, showing code examples for each: sequencing, choice, and recursive. He also covers the repetition pattern and how to integrate separators. Finally, with this groundwork laid, he gets to the JSON parser showing each step of the way, from reading in the JSON string to returning the object.

The TutsPlus site has posted the latest article in their "Programming with Yii" tutorial series, this time covering the generation of documentation for the API code that's been created to power the application.

Recently, I wrote about building REST APIs for your Yii application and expanded custom APIs for our startup series application, Meeting Planner.

In today's tutorial, I'll introduce you to Yii's apidoc extension, which automatically generates browsable documentation for your code. I'm going to use it to generate API documentation for Meeting Planner.

The tutorial starts off with helping you get the extension installed (via Composer) and links to a few examples of the end result. The tutorial then goes through how to add your own comments to your current files that will be output in the final result directly. This includes open text descriptions and other DocBlock information. It then shows how to generate the documentation, how to navigate the resulting HTML pages and some examples of what it will look like for the current code.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial by Marcello Duarte showing you how to use functional programming in PHP with the help of the Phunkie library.

Phunkie is a library with functional structures for PHP. In this tutorial, Phunkie creator Marcello Duarte, head of training at Inviqa, explains how to create Parser combinators using the functional library.

[...] Learning functional programming means immersing yourself in a new paradigm, which can be challenging. It requires a totally different mindset for approaching problems. So, by the time you can use functional programming to solve real-world problems, you’ll have spent hours grasping the new thinking or getting clued-up on the theory.

In this tutorial, my aim is to help fast-track your journey by going over my implementation of Hutton & Meijer’s Monadic Parser Combinators.

He starts off by defining two terms that will be used through out the code: parsers and combinators. He shares a code example of a combinator and then moves on to examples of primitive parsers and parser combinators. Each section includes the code you'll need to use (making use of Phunkie) to make the functional magic happen.