About the new version of Functional Programming in PHP
After five elucidatory posts about Functional Programming in PHP, I decided to include the rest of the series I — at the time — foresaw continuing as a series of blog posts, much like this one, in an eight-chapter opus. Upgrading, and therefore, improving the quality of the offerings of the volume is an almost perpetual proposition I have always acknowledged — a striving I have, since initial conceit, mused on. The latest iteration of my book, released on 2020–10–06, I believe, is an improvement on its predecessor.
The first of many improvements is the new content. I have, in the almost two years since the first release, familiarized myself with more FP ideas (rumor has it, I have been learning a Lisp dialect), and encoded the said knowledge — somewhat lossily — into digestible PHP parlance. To follow is an enumeration of the topics added to the volume:
- Category Theory
- The History of OOP
- Transducers
- The Railway Pattern
- Communicating Sequential Processes in PHP with ext-parallel
It is worth noting that the enumerated ideas do not necessarily break the mold of the book in so far as existing as separate chapters: they are mostly significant elucidatory additions to already comprehensive opus segments.
Next are the corrections. These, most readers of the first version might notice, are either omissions or verbiage enhancements aimed at improving subject clarity. Much like the new content, the corrections to the opus do not alter chapter fidelity or significantly change the reading flow.
Third, and probably the least significant of all the changes, is the noteworthy cosmetic enhancement. Functional Programming in PHP is Pandoc-generated, and my Pandoc knowledge — a lot like my FP knowledge — has broadened since 2018: the book has undergone a facelift inclusive of font-face modifications, code-block snippet line numbering, page header alterations, and tidy image inclusions. These aesthetic modifications — I believe — will likely prove optically soothing.
Finally, the new book version contains snippets whose syntax is adapted to work with releases of PHP — 7.4 or newer. Many illuminative snippets have undergone syntactic alteration, therefore. The modified examples are not difficult to parse as the aforestated syntax standard is quickly becoming commonplace in PHP circles.
It is my hope that you — a prospective reader of the new version of Functional Programming in PHP — purchase a full copy on Leanpub for $9.99 and enjoy the fullness of the book’s offerings.
