PHP: Tips and Best Practices — Professional Developer's Handbook

The book "PHP: Tips and Best Practices" is not another syntax tutorial, but a concentrate of real-world experience that helps you write clean, secure, and performant code. The author, Alexey Semenov, a senior developer with 10 years of experience, has compiled the most relevant techniques that are in demand in commercial development.

What this book is about

The publication covers the full cycle of creating PHP applications — from project organization to deployment. You will learn:

• How to follow PSR-1, PSR-2, PSR-4 and why this is important for teamwork;
• Design patterns (Factory, Singleton, Strategy, Repository) with real-world examples;
• SOLID principles and their application in PHP;
• Working with Composer, autoloading, and third-party libraries;
• Security: protection against SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, working with passwords;
• Optimization: caching, profiling, working with big data;
• Testing with PHPUnit and writing self-documenting code;
• Integration with popular frameworks (Laravel, Symfony) and CMS.

Who this book is for

• Beginner developers who have mastered the basics and want to write professional code;
• Middle developers seeking to systematize their knowledge and learn new approaches;
• Team leads and architects wanting to implement best practices in their team;
• PHP programmers transitioning from older versions to modern PHP 8.x.

What you will gain after reading

• Learn to organize code so that it is easy to maintain and extend;
• Be able to avoid common mistakes that lead to vulnerabilities and performance degradation;
• Master modern tools: PHPStan, Xdebug, Blackfire.io;
• Learn how to write tests and implement CI/CD for PHP projects;
• Get ready-made recipes for typical tasks: authorization, working with APIs, queues, caching.

The book contains over 200 practical code examples, checklists for code reviews, and links to useful resources. All tips are tested on real projects — from small websites to high-load services.

This is an ideal addition to the library of any PHP developer who wants to grow in their profession and write code they can be proud of.