Chapter 1, Setting Up the Environment, covers how to set up different development environments, including the installation of NGINX, PHP 7, and Percona Server on Windows, different Linux distros, and setting up the Vagrant virtual machine for development purposes.

Chapter 2, New Features in PHP 7, covers the major new features introduced in PHP 7, including Type Hints, Group use Declarations, Anonymous classes, and new operators, such as Spaceship operator, Null Coalesce operators, and the Uniform variable syntax.

Chapter 3, Improving PHP 7 Application Performance, covers different techniques to increase and scale a PHP 7 application's performance. In this chapter, we cover optimization of NGINX and Apache, CDN, and CSS/JavaScript, such as merging and minifying them, full-page caching, and installing and configuring Varnish. At last, we discuss an ideal infrastructure setup for application development.

Chapter 4, Improving Database Performance, covers techniques to optimize MySQL and Percona Server configuration for high performance. Also, it covers different tools to monitor the performance of a database. It also covers Memcached and Redis for caching objects.

Chapter 5, Debugging and Profiling, covers debugging and profiling techniques including the use of Xdebug for debugging and profiling, debugging with Sublime Text 3 and Eclipse, and the PHP DebugBar.

Chapter 6, Stress/Load Testing PHP Applications, covers different tools to stress and load test the application. It covers Apache JMeter, ApacheBench, and Siege for load testing. It also covers how to load test different open source systems such as Magento, Drupal, and WordPress on PHP 7 and PHP 5.6, and compares their performance on PHP 7 and PHP 5.6.

Chapter 7, Best Practices in PHP Programming, covers a few best practices for producing quality standard code. It covers coding styles, design patterns, service-oriented architecture, test-driven development, Git, and deployments.

Appendix A, Tools to Make Life Easy, discusses three of these tools in much more detail. The tools we will discuss are Composer, Git, and Grunt watch.

Appendix B, MVC and Frameworks, covers MVC design patterns and the most popular frameworks that are used in PHP development, which include Laravel, Lumen, and Apigility.

Any hardware specification that is compliant to run the latest versions of the following software should be enough to get through this book:

This book is for those who have basic experience in PHP programming. If you are developing performance-critical applications, then this book is for you.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

location ~ \.php$ {
  fastcgi_pass    127.0.0.1:9000;
  fastcgi_param    SCRIPT_FILENAME complete_path_webroot_folder$fastcgi_script_name;
  include    fastcgi_params;
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

server {
  …
  …
  root html;
  index index.php index.html index.htm;
  …

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

php-cgi –b 127.0.0.1:9000

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."

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