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

Technical requirements

To examine and run the code examples provided in this chapter, the minimum recommended hardware is the following:

  • An x86_64-based desktop PC or laptop
  • 1 gigabyte (GB) free disk space
  • 4 GB of RAM
  • 500 kilobits per second (Kbps) or faster internet connection

In addition, you will need to install the following software:

  • Docker
  • Docker Compose

Please refer to the Technical requirements section of Chapter 1, Introducing New PHP 8 OOP Features, for more information on Docker and Docker Compose installation, as well as how to build the Docker container used to demonstrate the code explained in this book. In this book, we refer to the directory in which you restored the sample code for this book as /repo.

The source code for this chapter is located at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/PHP-8-Programming-Tips-Tricks-and-Best-Practices. We can now begin our discussion by having a look at environments used as part of the overall...