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

Dealing with warnings that are now errors

In this section, we look at upgraded PHP 8 error handling pertaining to objects, arrays, and strings. We also examine situations where, in the past, PHP issued a Warning but where PHP 8 now throws an Error. It is critical that you become aware of any of the potential error situations addressed in this section. The reason is simple: if you fail to address the situations described in this section, when your server is upgraded to PHP 8 your code will break.

Developers are often pressed for time. It could be that there's a massive queue of new features or other changes that must be made. In other cases, resources have been pulled away to other projects, meaning fewer developers are available to perform maintenance. Warnings are often ignored because the application continues to run, so many developers simply turn off the error display and hope for the best.

Over the years, mountains upon mountains of badly written code have accumulated...