Book Image

Expert PHP 5 Tools

By : Dirk Merkel
Book Image

Expert PHP 5 Tools

By: Dirk Merkel

Overview of this book

Even if you find writing PHP code easy, writing code that is efficient and easy to maintain and reuse is not so straightforward. Self-taught PHP developers and programmers transitioning from other languages often lack the knowledge to work with PHP on an enterprise level. They need to take their PHP development skills to that level by learning the skills and tools necessary to write maintainable and efficient code.This book will enable you to take your PHP development skills to an enterprise level by teaching you the skills and tools necessary to write maintainable and efficient code. You will learn how to perform activities such as unit testing, enforcing coding standards, automating deployment, and interactive debugging using tools created for PHP developers – all the information in one place. Your code will be more maintainable, efficient, and self-documented.From the design phase to actually deploying the application, you will learn concepts and apply them using the best-of-breed tools available in PHP.Experienced developers looking for expertise in PHP development will learn how to follow best practices within the world of PHP. The book contains many well-documented code samples and recipes that can be used as a starting point for producing quality code.Specifically, you will learn to design an application with UML, code it in Eclipse with PDT, document it with phpDocumentor, debug it interactively with Xdebug, test it by writing PHPUnit tests, manage source code in Subversion, speed up development and increase stability by using Zend Framework, pull everything together using continuous integration, and deploy the application automatically with Phing – all in one book. The author's experience in PHP development enables him to share insights on using enterprise tools, in a clear and friendly way.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Expert PHP 5 Tools
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Summary


Just like programming itself, debugging is an art form. Also, the longer you do it, the better you get at it. After several years of developing software, experience and intuition will tell you which portion of the code to zoom in on when there is trouble. At the same time, experience isn't the only way to get better at debugging. Having the right tools at one's disposal and the knowledge to use them can cut down on debugging time significantly and can thus get you back to writing code more quickly. Hopefully, between learning to manage error logging configurations, developing a custom debug class that handles all exceptions and errors, and learning how to debug remotely, there are a few things we talked about in this chapter that you added to your arsenal.

I think that most developers who are not using a debugger are doing so because they think they don't need it. I'll be the first to admit that you can get a lot done with the combination of echo(), var_dump(), and exit(). However...