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

One of the most important concepts you learned in this chapter is a general trend away from resources and toward objects. You learned where this trend is noticeable in the various PHP extensions covered in this chapter, and how to develop workarounds to avoid problems in code that relies upon resources. You also learned how to detect and develop code to address changes in XML extensions, especially in the SimpleXML and XMLWriter extensions.

Another important extension with significant changes covered in this chapter is the mbstring extension. You learned to detect code that relies upon changed mbstring functionality. As you learned, changes to the mbstring extension for the most part mirror changes made to the equivalent core PHP string functions.

You also learned about major changes to the GD, Reflection, and ZIP extensions. In this chapter, you also learned about changes to a number of database extensions, as well as a medley of additional extension changes to note...