Book Image

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By : Doug Bierer
Book Image

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By: Doug Bierer

Overview of this book

PHP 7 comes with a myriad of new features and great tools to optimize your code and make your code perform faster than in previous versions. Most importantly, it allows you to maintain high traffic on your websites with low-cost hardware and servers through a multithreading web server. This book demonstrates intermediate to advanced PHP techniques with a focus on PHP 7. Each recipe is designed to solve practical, real-world problems faced by PHP developers like yourself every day. We also cover new ways of writing PHP code made possible only in version 7. In addition, we discuss backward-compatibility breaks and give you plenty of guidance on when and where PHP 5 code needs to be changed to produce the correct results when running under PHP 7. This book also incorporates the latest PHP 7.x features. By the end of the book, you will be equipped with the tools and skills required to deliver efficient applications for your websites and enterprises.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
PHP 7 Programming Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using getters and setters


At first glance, it would seemingly make sense to define classes with public properties, which can then be directly read or written. It is considered a best practice, however, to make properties protected, and to then define a getter and setter for each. As the name implies, a getter retrieves the value of a property. A setter is used to set the value.

Tip

Best practice

Define properties as protected to prevent accidental outside access. Use public get* and set* methods to provide access to these properties. In this manner, not only can you more precisely control access, but you can also make formatting and data type changes to the properties while getting and setting them.

How to do it...

  1. Getters and setters provide additional flexibility when getting or setting values. You are able to add an additional layer of logic if needed, something which would not be possible if you were to directly read or write a public property. All you need to do is to create a public method...