This sounds terrible, but I lent a copy of the “Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide” to my 15-year-old cousin Ben. What makes it terrible is that I myself had it on loan from my boss. I was searching among the titles available to me for a book that served as a good primer for an entry-level programmer with little-to-no exposure to PHP. After browsing the table of contents, I found myself impressed with the range of topics covered, especially taking into account the actual size of the book, which gives me hope that Ben will actually be able to pay attention for long enough to get the important details. Only time will tell. 
What caught my attention was a section titled “Design Pattern Theory”. It contains 5 pages giving a very, very basic introduction to 5 common object-oriented design patterns, and sample implementations and usage for 3 of them. My take away is this: As PHP programmers we should (at the very least) be able to recognize the following patterns in usage:
- Singleton
- Factory
- Registry
- Model-View-Controller
- ActiveRecord
I was pleased to see that a basic understanding of these common patterns is a requirement to obtain the title of “Zend Certified Engineer”. These are just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to these, I find myself fairly frequently giving explanation of how to read and understand code that makes use of a lot of object-orientation or less obvious design patterns. I’m going to make the effort to start documenting those topics here, at least for the benefit of those developers I know.
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