Chapter 1, The All New PHP, talks about the latest changes introduced to the PHP 7.1 language, most of which directly improve the quality and elegancy of written code.

Chapter 2, Embracing Standards, introduces you to important standards in the PHP ecosystem. Presented standards affect the quality and elegancy of code, pushing ypu closer to truly mastering PHP.

Chapter 3, Error Handling and Logging, stresses on the importance of robust error handling and effective logging. You will learn how to handle errors and log truly important bits of information--two disciplines that often lack proper attention in everyday PHP coding.

Chapter 4, Magic Behind Magic Methods, discusses the magic functions available in PHP classes, and their beauty and importance. You will learn every PHP magic method, and its meaning and use through practical examples.

Chapter 5, The Realm of CLI, explores command-line PHP, and its tools and processes. You will learn how to use Symfony's Console component, work with input/output streams, and handle processes.

Chapter 6, Prominent OOP Features, looks at a subset of features that turn PHP into a powerful OOP language. You will learn important concepts behind PHP OOP features, part of which may escape everyday code base as they find more use as building blocks of various frameworks.

Chapter 7, Optimizing for High Performance, talks about the importance of performance optimization, providing hands-on solutions along the way. You will learn about details of the PHP performance optimization, where small configuration changes can affect the overall application performance.

Chapter 8, Going Serverless, outlines using PHP and its use in serverless infrastructure. You will gain an insight into the emerging serverless architecture, along with utilizing it via two of the dominant PaaS (platform as a service) solutions in the market.

Chapter 9, Reactive Programming, covers the emerging reactive programming paradigm that found its way into the PHP ecosystem. You will learn the basic principles of reactive programming using the synchronous coding techniques to write asynchronous code via icicle, one of the most dominant libraries in the ecosystem now.

Chapter 10, Common Design Patterns, focuses on the subset of design patterns, and the most common ones used in PHP programming. You will learn the practical implementation of several important design patterns, which, in turn, will result in more elegant, readable, manageable, and testable code.

Chapter 11, Building Services, takes you through REST, SOAP, and RPC style services, alongside with the microservice architecture. You will learn how to create a SOAP and REST web server, alongside their respective client counterparts.

Chapter 12, Working with Databases, explains the several types of database PHP programmers need to interact with, such as transactional SQL, NoSQL, key-value, and search databases. You will learn how to query the MySQL, Mongo, and Redis databases.

Chapter 13, Resolving Dependencies, explores the dependency issue and the means to resolve it. You will learn how to solve the dependency issue using the dependency injection and dependency container techniques.

Chapter 14, Working with Packages, covers the ecosystem around PHP packages, and their creation and distribution. You will learn how to find and use third-party packages to enrich applications, along with a quick glimpse of possibly creating and distributing its own packages.

Chapter 15, Testing the Important Bits, dives into several types of testing, emphasizing where one might be more important than the other. You will learn several most common types of testing done for PHP web applications.

Chapter 16, Debugging, Tracing, and Profiling, teaches you the most common tools for debugging, tracing, and profiling PHP applications. You will learn how to utilize several various tools to achieve effective debugging, tracing, and profiling of your application.

Chapter 17, Hosting, Provisioning, and Deployment, discusses making an informed decision for hosting the application, along with provisioning, deployment, and continuous integration processes in place. You will learn about the difference between hosting solutions and the automated process of getting the code from local to production machines.

Throughout this book, there are a number of simple and self-contained code and configuration examples. To successfully run these, we can easily make use of the Ubuntu powered desktop (https://www.ubuntu.com/desktop) and server (https://www.ubuntu.com/server) machines. Those of you using Windows or OSX machines can easily install Ubuntu within a VirtualBox. Installation instructions for VirtualBox can be found on the official VirtualBox page (https://www.virtualbox.org/).

Target readers are assumed to be intermediate-level PHP developers. This book will embark you on a journey to become a master in PHP. Solid knowledge of PHP is implied across areas such as basic syntax, types, variables, constants, expressions, operators, control structures, and functions.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Objects might utilize the PHP Serializable interface, __sleep() or __wakeup() magic methods."

A block of code is set as follows:

interface RequestInterface extends MessageInterface
{
  public function getRequestTarget();
  public function withRequestTarget($requestTarget);
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

php index.php
serverless invoke local --function hello

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "We start by clicking the New Project button under the Iron.io dashboard."

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