This book will give you a great background in how AJAX functions work in most of the popular frameworks and allow you to build great Web 2.0 application without the need for them. The last chapter however does talk about Drag and Drop using script.aculo.us which is built on Prototype.

Some things that can be helpful in this book however include, using the Document Object Model, DOM and CSS, Charting using SVG, and AJAX RSS Readers. Good book overall if you are looking to build apps without frameworks. Nice job Packt Publishing

The first book that was delivered is the one that this post is dedicated to. Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder was picked to go over what I believe to be the base of successfully programming in PHP. Object oriented programming is not an option anymore when working in this business. So if you have been stuck as a procedural programming in PHP it’s time to remedy that and apply some new (well not really new) techniques and master the language.

Hayder begins the book off with exactly that, discussing and demonstrating the differences between Procedural PHP and Object Oriented PHP. I believe this knowledge to be essential to start your OO voyage. Pay attention to examples in this chapter as they give some good feedback on what cases OO is necessary. Hayder also explains the differences between PHP4 and PHP5′s OO approach for anyone who has PHP4 systems still in play. After that Chapter 2 goes into the nitty gritty basics of using OOP in PHP, including a sections on using interfaces and abstract classes.

The next chapter that sparked some interest is the chapter on Design Patterns, including some of my favorites: Singleton Pattern, Lazy Loading, and Adaptor Pattern. This is a must read if you will be developing frameworks or working with some of the more modern frameworks like Zend Framework. Here at NFi Studios we do framework development on top of Zend and commonly use some of these patterns.

Another hot topic over at work is Unit Testing, which is covered briefly in Chapter 5, I recommend reading this chapter and checking out the section on TDD (Test Driven Development), and the brief section on PHPUnit. I do however wish this section was a little bigger, but this is a book on OOP and I guess I could get a book on Unit Testing later on.

Other topics covered in this book include PDO (which is a database staple of Zend Framework), XML and MVC (which is the most popular architectural pattern in the PHP web development world). The books strong points are its definitions of OO concepts and examples given about them. So if you have a brief understanding of Object Oriented Programming but don’t understand all of the concepts, this book is for you.

For a good yet shorter read on PHP techniques using OOP I recommend this book. It gives you a good synopsis of big topics and gives you the ability to dive into bigger more complex books and some of the web resources and API’s out there.

I went to DCI Orlando and witnessed the upset of Caroline Crown over the Cadets, which in my opinion was well warranted. But this is the first time I will hear or see any of the corps from the Western part of the United States. I am also very excited to see the performance of the Santa Clara Vanguard which my friend Taylor is marching.

This trip should be a blast. I decided since I am staying awake to keep Danny company (he is driving) that I would get out the laptop do some work and then write a blog post. I did about 2 hours of coding and now decided to write this post.

In other news Packt Publishing sent me a few PHP books to review. I have read them and will be posting my reviews on this site and on Amazon. So if you are interested in some new PHP books check out my reviews later on.

Well my rapid typing is drowbing out the sound of jazz coming from the radio.

On a slightly geekier note. I have been addicted to one computer game since I was really young. I love the Sid Meier’s Civilization series. I have Civilization 4 for Mac and play it regularly when I have some free time. I also enjoy playing Age of Empires 3 (thanks to my roommate). But the exciting news is that Civilization Revolutions is being released as a console game for XBox 360. So I am very excited to pickup a copy on June 8th. Yay!

Well I hope everyone is well. I hope to write something a little more geeky in the coming days!

Here is the original code:

IndexController.php

require_once 'Zend/Controller/Action.php';
class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    public function indexAction()
    {
    }
}

We can remove the ‘require_once’ line, and then we need to set up the Zend Autoloader which can be done in your bootstrap file as follows:

index.php

...
require_once 'Zend/Loader.php';
Zend_Loader::registerAutoload();
...

I am not saying that my way is the ‘right’ way, but this might help streamline the design of your project, and remove some un-necessary ‘includes’. You can also load a class using the Zend_Loader by calling:

...
Zend_Loader::loadClass('CLASS NAME');
...

All of the tutorials are great. Maurice Fonk has some great insight into ZF, and has a great article on Integrating Smarty Templating Engine into ZF. Rob Allen’s blog also has some great stuff.