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

In this chapter, you learned about potential problems in OOP code when migrating to PHP 8. In the first section, you learned how a number of bad practices were allowed in PHP 7 and earlier versions, but now represent a potential code break in PHP 8. With this knowledge, you are a better developer and can deliver high-quality code to benefit your company.

In the next section, you learned good habits when using magic methods. Potential code breaks can occur because PHP 8 now enforces a degree of consistency not seen in earlier versions of PHP. These inconsistencies involve class constructor usage and certain aspects of magic method usage. The following section taught you about PHP serialization and how changes made in PHP 8 can make your code more resilient and less vulnerable to errors or attacks during the serialize and unserialize process.

In this chapter, you also learned about enhanced PHP 8 support for covariant return types and contravariant parameters. Having knowledge...