Hour 9. Objects

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• What objects and classes are

• How to create classes and instantiate objects

• How to create and access properties and methods

• How to manage access to properties and methods

• How to create classes that inherit functionality from others

• How to find out about objects in your code

• How to save objects to a string that can be stored in a file or database

Object-oriented programming is dangerous. It can change the way you think about coding, and once the concepts have a hold on you, they don't let go. PHP, like Perl before it, has progressively incorporated more object-oriented aspects into its syntax and structure. PHP 4 made it possible to use object-oriented code at the heart of a project. PHP 5 has extended PHP's object-oriented features still further.

Throughout this hour, you'll take a tour of PHP's object-oriented features and apply them to some real-world code.