Over the past three years PHP has evolved from being a niche language used to add dynamic functionality to small sites to a powerful tool making strong inroads into large-scale, business-critical Web systems.

The rapid maturation of PHP has created a skeptical population of users from more traditional "enterprise" languages who question the readiness and ability of PHP to scale, as well as a large population of PHP developers without formal computer science backgrounds who have learned through the hands-on experimentation while developing small and midsize applications in PHP. While there are many books on learning PHP and developing small applications with it, there is a serious lack of information on "scaling" PHP for large-scale, business-critical systems.

Schlossnagle's Advanced PHP Programming fills that void, demonstrating that PHP is ready for enterprise Web applications by showing the reader how to develop PHP-based applications for maximum performance, stability, and extensibility.

• Introduction
• I. Implementation and Development Methodologies
  • Coding Styles
  • Object-Oriented Programming through Design Patterns
  • Error Handling
  • Implementing with PHP: Templates and the Web
  • Implementing with PHP: Standalone Scripts
  • Unit Testing
  • Managing the Development Environment
  • Designing a Good API
• II. Caching
  • External Performance Tunings
  • Data Component Caching
  • Computational Reuse
• III. Distributed Applications
  • Interacting with Databases
  • User Authentication and Session Security
  • Session Handling
  • Building a Distributed Environment
  • RPC: Interacting with Remote Services
• IV. Performance
  • Application Benchmarks: Testing an Entire Application
  • Profiling
  • Synthetic Benchmarks: Evaluating Code Blocks and Functions
• V. Extensibility
  • PHP and Zend Engine Internals
  • Extending PHP: Part I
  • Extending PHP: Part II
  • Writing SAPIs and Extending the Zend Engine
  • Index