Expert PHP 5 Tools review

The book I'm reviewing today is Expert PHP 5 Tools, which in the last month has gained a lot of momentum in the blogosphere.

One of the first part of this book makes a great deal (correctly) of coding standards. Although this focus on the code, this is not a book on how to write code (with topics like object-oriented design for example), but as the title suggests on tools that supports the development, and on how to deal with the infrastructure necessary to maintain a project.

Some of the main topics treated by this book are version control (with Subversion), and debugging/error management in PHP (Xdebug). Sure you'll never introduce breakpoint in PHP, debugging is much simpler than in other languages as a script terminates after every request; but having the right tools can speed up you very much. I still prefer thorough testing to debugging.
Another interesting topic is the use of PHP open source frameworks, with a panoramic of the available solutions and a Zend Framework example. Don't worry about the particular technology since MVC stacks of the different frameworks (which are the innovation that makes a framework different from a library, as it manages HTTP requests and responses) are usually equivalent.
 
The second part of the book goes on to cover topics such as testing (a delicate topic for me), and deployment of applications. PHPUnit is introduced from the ground up, with all its features like annotations, fixtures and code coverage reports. Even Test-Driven Development is discussed to some extent.

A bit out of place was the introduction to Uml, a dangerous standard when applied in the large or at a great level of detail. Remember though that understanding of basic Uml (class, sequence) diagrams is a requirement since many patterns are explained with this kind of documentation. Moreover, small and focused Uml diagrams can communicate very much about a design.
The practice of Continuos Integration is explained with a nice idea: setting up a CI server for Zend Framework. Leveraging open source projects gives some points to this book.

Some points I did not like was the idea of favoring IDEs very much, which is quite the contrary of the toolbox metaphor, a set of small tools you can combine instead of a monolithic one. Another minor point is the large preference for PHP tools over the ones written in other languages: after all the author is using Eclipse, which is certainly not written in PHP.

I'm not severe on this type of readings, because I always have to remember that a book is a starting point: you have to actually use the practices described here and gain experience to be effective. Thus, if you are a project manager which wants to really empower his developers instead of limiting them, check out this book.