NYCPHP Meetup

[Adam Maccabee Trachtenberg]

On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, jon baer wrote:

> i actually got the mastering php 5 cd just for the hell of it and it was a
> bit of a con (there was 1 small chapter on php5 coming features) lesson
> learned :-\ ...

Any book (or CD) today that claims to "cover PHP 5" is lying. There
have been many significant changes to PHP 5 in the last few months and
while a book may be mostly correct, they will omit some features,
cover some features were dropped from PHP 5, and document other
features incorrectly.

For instance, just this week way you clone objects went from $new =
$old->__clone() to $new = clone $old. Not a big deal, except that you
don't want your reference guide to show you the old syntax.

There's also a book on the market that discusses PHP 5 and
namespaces. Namespaces were dropped from PHP 5 months ago, but this
book is out there saying they're in. If you don't know better, you'll
end up very confused.

PHP 5 is exciting, but we probably need the rest of February for PHP 5
to settle down completely and give developers time to see if the
features in PHP 5 are both designed and implemented correctly.

On a positive note, it looks like a SOAP extension written in C will
be bundled with PHP 5. Previously, you needed to install a SOAP
package written in PHP, which meant that SOAP was slowish and you
couldn't count on SOAP being installed on your machine. (Actually, you
could usually count on it not being installed.)

This extension will provide developers with a significant speed
increase (I would never claim SOAP is fast) and (depending upon how
solid the extension shapes up to be) it will be enabled by default.

Unfortunately, like most things PHP 5, documentation is
non-existent. :)

-adam

-- 
adam at trachtenberg.com
author of o'reilly's php cookbook
avoid the holiday rush, buy your copy today!