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my understanding based on my personal evolution and 10 years of observing others' evolution (and sometimes lack thereof), is that budding programmers begin procedurally, become functional, and break through to object oriented.

that is probably only true in an embedded language like php [and ...insert list of others since my doing so would generate unrelated side discussions)].

as a procedural programmer, i could not understand the need to functionalize because the "chess game" of my programming ability did not extend past the very next line to write or hurdle to accomplish. once i had solved the same types of issues several different times and several different ways, i found a "groove" that i wished to have readily available for future projects.

it's that very groove that becomes the seeds of a personal scripting library. just as the dewey decimal system posed to improve upon the rigors of alphabetizing library resources, object oriented programming (oop) is an advanced method of categorizing and reusing that very functional library that all intermediate and advanced programmers (regardless of their current involvement with oop) DO have readily available in order to efficiently implement best practices and save their customers money by producing good products in a rapid, professional manner.

i, jay johnston, apologize for the long winded method of saying, http://php.net/__autoload is amazing. i strongly urge any programmer still attempting vanilla "requires" to spend the one or two hours necessary to get this CRUCIAL magic function under their belt. it will save you that many hours of hassle on the first project alone (assuming an oop project of the size mentioned herein).



Last Updated: 2009-05-01 11:36:45