Simon Willison’s Weblog

Catching up with Harry

I’m not sure how I missed this, but Harry Fueck’s new book The PHP Anthology was published by SitePoint back in December, as a hefty 2 volume epic. Harry is the guru behind PHP Patterns and really knows his stuff. While the book is at first glance a cookbook for solving web related problems, Harry also uses it as a platform for teaching sensible development practises:

Between the lines I’ve focused on teaching OOP by example, partly by developing classes in the book and also by taking advantage of Open Source class libraries I’m familiar with; in most cases projects from PEAR.

That’s also where I’d say The PHP Anthology is unique, in it aims to get readers to avoid re-inventing wheels already done many times in PHP. Although many of the subjects have been seen before (often online), the focus here is either to use an Open Source class library or put one together, solving a problem once and for all, as opposed a hacked script that goes half way.

Sample chapters from the books are available online, including an excellent explanation of caching techniques. Harry is also one of my co-bloggers over at SitePoint where he writes about (you guessed it) PHP in Dynamically Typed.