Get this book on Leanpub

A couple of weeks ago, Tomas Votruba emailed me saying that he just realized that we hadn’t published an update of the book we wrote together since December 2021. The book I’m talking about is “Rector - The Power of Automated Refactoring”. Two years have passed since we published the current version. Of course, we’re all very busy, but no time for excuses - this is a book about keeping projects up-to-date with almost no effort… We are meant to set an example here!

My new book Recipes for Decoupling is 100% complete and available now!

And now some other news related to this book.

A little background information

My new book is based on two things: 20 years of experience with (mostly framework) coupling issues in legacy code, and the hypothesis that PHPStan, the automated static analysis tool for PHP, can help us keep our code decoupled. Decoupling often means we want to use a dependency, but don’t want to couple our code too tightly to it. The process of decoupling often involves some kind of rule, like “don’t use Container::get()”, but we don’t want to focus on this rule all the time, or explain it to new members of the team. Instead, we want a tool that shows you an error when you don’t follow the rule. Such an error will break the build of the project and prevent you from ever coupling to a dependency in this specific way again.

In October 2020 I asked Tomáš Votruba, the mastermind behind Rector, if we could have a little chat about this tool. I wanted to learn more about it and had spent a couple of days experimenting with it. Tomáš answered all my questions, which was tremendously valuable to me personally. When this happens I normally feel the need to share: there should be some kind of artefact that can be published, so others can also learn about Rector and how to extend it based on your own refactoring needs.