I’m happy to announce that my PHP 5.4 Cheat Sheet from DZone Refcardz was published today. This is a major update to DZone’s existing PHP Refcard with material for PHP 5.4 added. In anticipation of this release, DZone interviewed me about this update. From the interview:
The PHP 5.4 Refcard is for beginner to intermediate PHP developers. It’s not for complete beginners as readers will need to have some knowledge of things like basic control structures and data types. More experienced PHP developers should find this Refcard helpful, too. For example, there’s a section on security that talks about filtering input, escaping output, and password encryption.
Being a cheat sheet, there was only so much space available and a lot of great content had to be cut. Also from the interview:
The biggest section to be cut was the one on classes and objects. Some of the object-oriented programming features not included were property/method visibility, class constants, static properties/methods, abstract classes, abstract methods, interfaces, traits (introduced in PHP 5.4), late static binding, type hinting, namespaces, autoloading, exceptions, and the Standard PHP Library (SPL). This section alone probably could have fit in an entire Refcard. Some other content that was cut included more details on data types, how to use database transactions with PDO, details on working with the various string syntaxes, more detail on arrays, more examples of working with functions, how to serve static assets using the built-in web server, and further details on working with dates and times.
A big thanks to Engine Yard for sponsoring this Refcard!
