I haven't used PHP in around 6 years (running PHP 4 I belive); has the language improved ? My biggest complaint was that the API was incredibly inconsistent, but that seemed like it could be improved in later versions if they weren't afraid of breaking backwards compatibility.
PHP Apprentice – An online, open-source book for learning PHP
21–30 of 75 posts
Re: PHP Apprentice – An online, open-source book for learning PHP
#22I haven't used PHP in around 6 years (running PHP 4 I belive); has the language improved ? My biggest complaint was that the API was incredibly inconsistent, but that seemed like it could be improved in later versions if they weren't afraid of breaking backwards compatibility.
There have been a number of improvements in the latest PHP versions, especially in terms of performance.
There's still artifacts of past PHP versions that are there, though, which makes it far less nice to use than something more modern.
Re: PHP Apprentice – An online, open-source book for learning PHP
#23I haven't used PHP in around 6 years (running PHP 4 I belive); has the language improved ? My biggest complaint was that the API was incredibly inconsistent, but that seemed like it could be improved in later versions if they weren't afraid of breaking backwards compatibility.
I have been using PHP for a new job after not using it since PHP 4 too but I was also a very immature dev back then. I quite like it. It's not perfect and it still lacks some things but it's very easy to put something together. I think that my biggest problem is actually that it's too easy, which makes some people write code that it's a bit too sloppy and hard to understand, creating a possibly huge technical dept.
Re: PHP Apprentice – An online, open-source book for learning PHP
#24Nice job and well written. A nice addition would be how to use pdo. I'm appalled by the number of ressources I see online which are using the old mysql api.
PDO is definitely on the list. There are very few resources for it.
Re: PHP Apprentice – An online, open-source book for learning PHP
#25I haven't used PHP in around 6 years (running PHP 4 I belive); has the language improved ? My biggest complaint was that the API was incredibly inconsistent, but that seemed like it could be improved in later versions if they weren't afraid of breaking backwards compatibility.
It has improved a lot in that time and I find it decent to work with now that there's decent dependency management with Composer and a good Rails-like framework in Laravel.
Re: PHP Apprentice – An online, open-source book for learning PHP
#26Very well done, there’s a lot to help a novice PHP developer. I feel like the next chapters I’d love to see would take those concepts and apply them to building something. Everything so far unless I missed it is focused on the backend but it’s important to show that it’s also possible to use it as a front end and what the modern approaches to doing that are.
I plan to add a new section for learning how to use the concepts to build a basic website. I wanted to start with backend foundation first.
Re: PHP Apprentice – An online, open-source book for learning PHP
#27Looks great! Perhaps, making it possible to turn pages with the arrow keys on the keyboard would make it a bit easier to navigate.
Noted! That would be an easy addition.
Re: PHP Apprentice – An online, open-source book for learning PHP
#28Good job ! Please add something about namespaces.
It’s on the roadmap!
Re: PHP Apprentice – An online, open-source book for learning PHP
#29I haven't used PHP in around 6 years (running PHP 4 I belive); has the language improved ? My biggest complaint was that the API was incredibly inconsistent, but that seemed like it could be improved in later versions if they weren't afraid of breaking backwards compatibility.
It was likely PHP 5. The last PHP 4 release is more than 10 years old [1].
Later versions of PHP 5 were worlds apart from version 4.
Re: PHP Apprentice – An online, open-source book for learning PHP
#30I love PHP, it was my first “real” programming language, and I’m glad there are still people trying to make it easier to adopt. Having skimmed through several of these chapters, though, I just feel like it’s too similar to the official PHP docs, even down to the TOC. Wouldn’t it have been better for everyone to put this effort into improving the docs, rather than developing yet another book in a silo that likely won’…
I started with foundational concepts which will overlap some with the official docs. The advantage of my site is I wanted it to be more readable, since the official docs can be hard to navigate. In the future, I want to cover topics like Composer and Slim which would not be appropriate for PHP.net.