About This Course

Prerequisites

To fully benefit from the course, knowledge of the following programming concepts is required:

• Variables and how to assign values to them
• Control structures like if, else, foreach, and for
• Strings and string concatenation (using .)
• Integers
• Expressions and comparisons (<, and >, for example)
• Associative arraysArrays with string keys and values. and indexed arraysArrays where only the values are relevant.

What’s in the course

Each chapter covers a separate aspect of functional programming in some meaningful way. The course should be followed in order, using the code examples as they’re presented.

Below is a brief overview of the contents of each chapter in the course:

• An Introduction to Functional Programming in PHP: This chapter provides a brief history of PHP, a definition of functional programming, an explanation of the perks on offer, and its relevance to a PHP developer.

• Core Concepts: Functional Programming in PHP: This chapter focuses on the idea of writing pure functions, immutability as a concept, and grading functions based on referential transparency.

• Composition and Helper Functions: This chapter serves as a detailed exploration of function composition. It also provides commentary on transducers and the map, filter, and fold operations for manipulating list data. Finally, it discusses helper functions, whose utility is their conceptual abstraction.

• Functors in PHP: This chapter focuses on the Functor construct. It offers an insight into Category Theory, demonstrates how to roll out functors in PHP, and explains monads of various kinds, such as IO, State, Reader, and List.

• Phonebook Application — A Simple Project: This chapter is a walkthrough on how to create a simple console phonebook application in the functional programming style.