Book/tutorial that teaches how to make programs that are easy to maintain and are less coupled?

Question

I'm a PHP programmer and I really want to increase the quality of my code and most importantly I want to be better at programming.

What book, tutorial or article would you guys suggest that I read that teaches how to make programs that are less coupled and easy to maintain? Are there any specific tips for PHP especially for the CakePHP framework?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The Pragmatic Programmer is a good fit here. A little high level, but lots and lots of important, valuable, and clear wisdom. It's language-agnostic.

As for PHP, personally I'm not much of a fan, I think there are other languages that are much better at supporting decoupling. Python, Java, C#, Scala — even JavaScript, with a CommonJS runtime such as Node.js.

That said, you asked about PHP, so my advice would be to find some well-designed Open Source apps and see how they did it. Unfortunately I don't know any specifically, but there must be some.

Answer 2

As someone in a similar situation, I'm finding PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice (as recommended here) very helpful.