Re: PHP5 Book Recommendation?

On Sun, 19 Sep 2004 07:26:25 +1000, Justin French <justin.french@indent.com.au> wrote: > Can someone recommend a decent PHP5 book? In particular, I'm > interested in Classes and OOP. I consider myself an above average PHP4 > developer, so I'm definitely not looking for a beginner book, BUT I > have ZERO experience with OOP (in any language), so I'd like a book > that can teach me everything I need to know about OOP one step at a > time, geared towards good OOP design, and PHP5-specific OOP problems. I was in the exact same position as you for many years. I even started writing all of my functions in classes/objects because I thought that's what I was supposed to be doing, but never really understood why. Then I got a cheap paperback book called THE OBJECT-ORIENTED THOUGHT PROCESS by Matt Weisfeld, and it *finally* all made sense! This book is *so* well-written, that you really understand the whole OOP mindset after just the first 3 chapters. Justin, I highly recommend you get this book. Then AFTER reading it, spend even an hour with PHP5 getting to see how PHP5 does inheritance, abstract classes, private/public methods, etc. But really you need to understand the mindset first, and THEN the language-specifics. (And then for the fun of it, spend a weekend learning Ruby : http://www.ruby-lang.com/en/ - where *everything* is an object.)