Book Image

PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

By : Doug Bierer
Book Image

PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

By: Doug Bierer

Overview of this book

Thanks to its ease of use, PHP is a highly popular programming language used on over 78% of all web servers connected to the Internet. PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices will help you to get up-to-speed with PHP 8 quickly. The book is intended for any PHP developer who wants to become familiar with the cool new features available in PHP 8, and covers areas where developers might experience backward compatibility issues with their existing code after a PHP 8 update. The book thoroughly explores best practices, and highlights ways in which PHP 8 enforces these practices in a much more rigorous fashion than its earlier versions. You'll start by exploring new PHP 8 features in the area of object-oriented programming (OOP), followed by enhancements at the procedural level. You'll then learn about potential backward compatible breaks and discover best practices for improving performance. The last chapter of the book gives you insights into PHP async, a revolutionary new way of programming, by providing detailed coverage and examples of asynchronous programming using the Swoole extension and Fibers. By the end of this PHP book, you'll not only have mastered the new features, but you'll also know exactly what to watch out for when migrating older PHP applications to PHP 8.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: PHP 8 Tips
6
Section 2: PHP 8 Tricks
11
Section 3: PHP 8 Best Practices

Summary

PHP 8, as you learned, is much stricter in terms of how it defines magic methods. In this chapter, you learned about method signature changes and how to reduce potential bugs by using magic methods properly. You also learned about the method signature changes in both the Reflection and PDO extensions. With the knowledge you've gained in this chapter, you can avoid potential problems when migrating to PHP 8. In addition, you learned about changes in how static methods can be called, as well as a new static return type.

Then, you learned how to make the best use of private methods, as well as how to exert greater control over anonymous classes. You also picked up a few tips on new syntax possibilities and which methods are now obsolete due to changes in the language.

You also learned how to correctly use interfaces and traits to facilitate efficient use of your code. You learned about the new interfaces that were introduced to bring the DOM extension up to the new...