Posted by NC on 11/07/07 23:24

On Nov 7, 6:11 am, firewood...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> I need some help in furthering my education in OOP.
> I have developed a set of PHP scripts that I use in
> a fairly sophisticated database driven website, but
> I am not proud of the rather amateurish programming
> that I used to create the functionality. Although
> I use classes and objects to organize my data and
> their related functions, it seems to be only marginally
> better than plain procedural programming.

In fact, it is probably worse than procedural programming; using OOP
creates substantial overhead (initializing objects requires CPU cycles
and memory that would not be used if the code were procedural).

> The next step, it seems to me, is to become much more skilled in
> analyzing a program from an OOP point of view and learning the
> techniques for organizing the structure of the scripts and how to
> implement them in a website. In other words, I want to move from
> amateur to pro in terms of both career and technique.

If you want to do it in PHP, you need to start by learning the limits
of OOP. PHP developers often face a trade-off between development
time and application performance; code developed quickly (usually,
using an object-oriented framework) requires more system resources to
run, while code that runs fast has to stay away from all kinds of
abstraction, including OOP.

> Can someone point me in the direction of the right schools(online),
> books, websites, example code, or other assets that I can use to
> learn?

Read up on patterns. Note, however, that these days, most books on
patterns are written with Java in mind.

> Also, is PHP the best language to use to learn and implement
> the full power of OOP?

Definitely not. PHP is the best language to learn deficiencies of
OOP. :)

> If not, any suggestions?

C++ and Java.

Cheers,
NC

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