Book Image

PHP 7 Data Structures and Algorithms

By : Rahman
5 (1)
Book Image

PHP 7 Data Structures and Algorithms

5 (1)
By: Rahman

Overview of this book

PHP has always been the the go-to language for web based application development, but there are materials and resources you can refer to to see how it works. Data structures and algorithms help you to code and execute them effectively, cutting down on processing time significantly. If you want to explore data structures and algorithms in a practical way with real-life projects, then this book is for you. The book begins by introducing you to data structures and algorithms and how to solve a problem from beginning to end using them. Once you are well aware of the basics, it covers the core aspects like arrays, listed lists, stacks and queues. It will take you through several methods of finding efficient algorithms and show you which ones you should implement in each scenario. In addition to this, you will explore the possibilities of functional data structures using PHP and go through advanced algorithms and graphs as well as dynamic programming. By the end, you will be confident enough to tackle both basic and advanced data structures, understand how they work, and know when to use them in your day-to-day work
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Standard PHP Library (SPL) and data structures

The Standard PHP Library (SPL), is one of the best possible features of the PHP language in last few years. SPL was created to solve common problems which were lacking in PHP. SPL extended the language in many ways but one of the striking features of SPL is its support of data structures. Though SPL is used for many other purposes, we are going to focus on the data structure part of SPL. SPL comes with core PHP installations and does not require any extension or change in configurations to enable it.

SPL provides a set of standard data structures through Object-Oriented Programming in PHP. The supported data structures are:

  • Doubly linked lists: It is implemented in SplDoublyLinkedList.
  • Stack: It is implemented in SplStack by using SplDoublyLinkedList.
  • Queue: It is implemented in SplQueue by using SplDoublyLinkedList.
  • Heaps: It is implemented in SplHeap. It also supports max heap in SplMaxHeap and min heap in SplMinHeap.
  • Priority queue: It is implemented in SplPriorityQueue by using SplHeap.
  • Arrays: It is implemented in SplFixedArray for a fixed size array.
  • Map: It is implemented in SplObjectStorage.

In coming chapters, we are going to explore each of the SPL data structure implementations and know their pros and cons, along with their performance analysis with our implementation of corresponding data structures. But as these data structures are already built in, we can use them for a quick turnaround of features and applications.

After the release of PHP 7, everyone was happy with the performance boost of the PHP application in general. PHP SPL is not having the similar performance boost in many cases, but we are going to analyze those in upcoming chapters.