Recommendation for books/resources

limeonade

Hi everyone,

I'm been a dabbler in PHP for a few years and enjoy coding and making little scripts but I want to take the next step and develop a little application. I need some help with the design/planning part. I'm just looking for some recommendations for some good books or online resources that I can read about planning out a web application, specifically laying out the groundwork, and info about database design. On google searches I keep finding coding books, I'm probably not using specific enough keywords but ... shrug. If you know of any good resources or have any personal tips at all, please let me know.

Thanks a lot

Lime

potatoCode

First thing pops up in my head is Design Patterns by GoF.
As for the database modeling, I'm still on the lookout for it myself.
Till then you can always start with SQL Bible,
or study online materials as you go.

Hope this helps.

limeonade

Thanks for the response potatoCode, really appreciate it. I wasn't getting any responses and they moved my post to the lounge for some reason, which probably won't help in getting useful responses.

I looked over the description and reviews at amazon and it looks more about software design with C++ than web application design with PHP. I bet there are design patterns that would carry over to php web application but I prefer to first look at any books specific to php and then branch out if there aren't any good ones to read. Most books I've looked at about PHP basically teach you how to code starting from some small example and letting you build up to something bigger. The problem with those books is that they don't teach you how to plan an application so that once you start adding stuff on, it becomes a big mess of a script.

Still looking, but again, thanks for your recommendation.

Browsing the recommended books thread and there's a newer one mentioned that looks promising.

NogDog

PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice
Essential PHP Security

Weedpacket

If you're looking for books focusing on PHP then it's no surprise that the books you keep finding focus on coding. Application design takes place at a higher conceptual level than coding, so the specific choice of programming language isn't that relevant (MVC would still be MVC whether you were doing it in COBOL or Haskell).

That said, some languages make some patterns easier than others, depending on the design of the language (some of the patterns that GoF mention virtually disappear in a prototypical-inheritance/functional language like JavaScript). So understanding as many languages as possible is also of benefit, not just because you can then use whichever language is appropriate in a given situation, but because each one provides its own perspective on how programs can be built.

NogDog

If you're interested in learning some general concepts of OOA/D (object-oriented analysis/design), a fairly user-friendly book is O'Reilly's Head First OOA&D book. It's code examples are all in Java, but it's close enough to PHP5 OOP that it's all 95%-plus transferable.