THIS BOOK STRIVES TO MAKE YOU ANexpert PHP programmer. Being an expert pro-grammer does not mean being fully versed in the syntax and features of a language
(although that helps); instead, it means that you can effectively use the language to solve
problems.When you have finished reading this book, you should have a solid under-standing of PHP’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the best ways to use it to tackle
problems both inside and outside the Web domain.
This book aims to be idea focused, describing general problems and using specific
examples to illustrate—as opposed to a cookbook method, where both the problems and
solutions are usually highly specific. As the proverb says: “Give a man a fish, he eats for a
day.Teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime.”The goal is to give you the tools to
solve any problem and the understanding to identify the right tool for the job.
In my opinion, it is easiest to learn by example, and this book is chock full of practi-cal examples that implement all the ideas it discusses. Examples are not very useful with-out context, so all the code in this book is real code that accomplishes real tasks.You will
not find examples in this book with class names such as FooandBar; where possible,
examples have been taken from live open-source projects so that you can see ideas in
real implementations