Who this book is for

This book is certainly aimed at the PHP developer looking to learn about the complete set of skills needed to be a software engineer, in particular, some lessons from software design; this book will seek to educate you on how your code can be made more extensible and easier to develop on. This book seeks to take your code beyond just being a bag of functions and classes, instead preferring well-designed, well-written, and well-tested code.

You will need a working knowledge of PHP and enough to build an application, but by no means do you have to be a total expert at everything in PHP; a working knowledge of the basics of software engineering will certainly give you a heads up.

You must encounter this book with an open mind and a willingness to have your preconceptions about software development challenged. This book will confront some truths about how you may be failing personally as a developer; it is vital that you approach this book with a willingness to take these principles onboard.

This book presents a set of software development patterns and principles that you can adopt. It is vital that you understand where these patterns should and shouldn’t be applied; this will be explained throughout the book, especially in the last chapter.

A key tenet of reading this book is understanding what PHP is for and what it isn’t. I expect you to enter this book understanding what problems you expect PHP to solve and what you expect to use other software development languages to solve.