First of all, make it clear that the PHP engineer I am referring to means that after graduation, I mainly use PHP to develop WEB systems and have never worked in other languages. I have about 3 to 4 years of work experience. I am basically comfortable in developing ordinary WEB systems (million-level access, less than 1,000-level data, or the business logic is not particularly complex) without any problems. But they will point out things like this:
Do not use other languages except PHP, and may click on shell scripts.
Not good at mastering PHP (have not read many PHP manuals, except libraries)
The knowledge is relatively narrow (faced with the demand, apart from using PHP and mysql, I don’t know other solutions )
PHP code is mainly process, and they think the object-oriented implementation is too convoluted and difficult to understand
These PHPers encounter projects or businesses that require high performance, high concurrency processing, and large amounts of data. When the logic is complex (the system needs to solve business problems in multiple fields), there is a lack of ideas. They are unable to analyze the essence of the problem and have poor technical judgment. They can quickly find temporary solutions to the problem, but often the system and themselves collapse step by step in the constant temporary solutions. So how do you improve yourself? How can I challenge a more difficult system?
Where are the higher challenges?
Based on my own experience, I list some specific challenges to give everyone a perceptual understanding.
What are the challenges of high-performance systems?
How to choose a WEB server? Should I use fast-cgi mode
Should I use a reverse proxy service? Choose full memory cache or hard disk cache?
Do you need load balancing? Is it based on the application layer or the network layer? How to ensure high reliability?
How is the performance of your PHP code after using optimization tools? Where is the performance bottleneck? Does it need to be written as an extension of C?
What are the characteristics of user access? Is it more reading or writing? Is read-write separation required?
How is the data stored? What are the writing and reading speeds? How does access speed change as data increases?
How to use caching? How to consider failure? How to ensure data consistency?
What are the challenges of high-complexity systems?
Can you identify the field that the business corresponds to? Is it one or multiple?
Can the business be abstracted reasonably so that changes in business rules can be realized at a small cost?
Can the consistency and security of data be guaranteed?
Have you mastered object-oriented analysis and design methods?
When you can answer the questions I listed in the affirmative, I think it is basically possible for you to become an architect technically. Master. If you can't answer it yet, you need to strengthen in the following directions.
How to improve and break through bottlenecks
If you can’t answer it yet, you need to strengthen in the following directions:
Analyze what you are using The principles of technology and the mechanism behind its operation can improve your technical judgment and improve the correctness of your choice of technical solutions;
Learn important knowledge during college, operating system principles, data structures and algorithms. Know that you used to study for exams, but now you need to study for yourself and let yourself know why.
Start learning C language again, even though you have already learned it in college. This is not only because you may need to write PHP extensions, but also because, in C applications, there is an environment that always cares about performance, memory control, variable life cycle, data structures and algorithms.
Learn object-oriented analysis and design, which is an effective method to solve complex problems. Learn abstraction, it is the only way to solve complex problems.
"How do you learn so many things? How long does it take to learn?"
If you work hard and have a good plan, it is estimated to take 1 to 2 years. We will discuss how to study later.
(Note: The following is the learning method shared by the original author Zuo Wenjian)
Learning suggestions
How to study effectively is a big problem. I have some practice but it is very scattered and difficult to summarize. Before going to bed last night, I suddenly thought of the core of RUP, which is "architecture-centered, use case-driven, and iterative development." Borrowing this idea, effective learning methods can be expressed like this:
Based on principles, Model or mechanism-centered, task-driven, iterative learning
is a bit abstract, let’s give an example to illustrate how to learn.
Purpose: Learn how to improve processing performance.
Iterable-driven task: Find the location by IP.
This is a common task for WEB applications. The IP database has about 100,000 rows of records.
First iteration: Implementing the function without considering performance (implemented through PHP)
Because the region cannot be searched directly through KEY (IP), so The simple method of putting it directly into the data or through an associative array will not work. The idea is to sort the data first and then search
1. How to search by IP? For ordered data, binary search is the fastest.
2. How to sort? Of course you can use the library function sort, but since you are learning, it is better to implement quick sort yourself.
Learning objectives: Sorting algorithm, search algorithm
PHPer’s data structure and algorithm foundation is relatively poor. I don’t usually have tasks in this area, and I don’t learn it myself, so I lack knowledge in this area. However, the problems solved by programming will ultimately come down to the data structure and the algorithms that operate on this data structure. If the data structure algorithm is always in your mind, you will be able to clearly understand its inner structure when you encounter a problem, and the solution will naturally emerge.
Second iteration: Optimizing data loading and sorting
If you do the first step, it is basically still unusable because the data is needed every time Loading and sorting is too time consuming. The solution is to load and sort the data once and put it in a place where each PHP process can access it.
Put it in memcache This is an easy question for everyone. In fact, putting it in shared memory (supported by EA and other accelerators) is a faster way, because memcache also has more network operations. Whether the data is put into the shared memory as a whole or in chunks, how to test the performance? How to analyze the bottleneck (xdebug)? Driven by these problems, you will learn
Learning objectives: detection, positioning, Methods to optimize PHP performance; the impact of PHP implementation structure on performance.
The third iteration: Writing PHP extensions
The performance still cannot improve, and I have to enter the world of C/C++, but from now on you will not only be a PHPer As for the all-round engineers on the server side, of course this is a huge challenge for students who have never done C/C++. I can't simply explain how to learn C/C++ here. You can refer to "PHP Programmers Learn C++"
Learning goals: learning C/C++, writing PHP extensions
How to determine the need What about the mechanisms and principles of learning? How to find the driving learning tasks?
I don’t have any idea about what I need to learn. How should I answer the above two questions?
Find out the key points that need to be learned from the positioning of this technology, that is, how it does it (mechanism) and why it can do it (model or principle)
List the most common aspects of this technology Application, as a learning task, is carried out from simple to difficult.
If I need to learn Javascript, I have some perceptual knowledge of HTML and CSS
First of all, I understand that JS is a dynamic language in the WEB field, which mainly solves the dynamic interaction of web pages.
The key points I want to learn are as follows:
How JS interacts with HTML (mechanism)
What are the dynamic characteristics of JS, and how are they different from other dynamic languages? (Language model)
If you are completely self-study, find the key points that need to be learned (mechanism, model, principle). Setting learning tasks is indeed not that easy to grasp. If you find an experienced person to guide you or add a learning team, the speed of learning will indeed be greatly improved.
Finally, what I want to say is: PHP is used because it is simple, but its simplicity cannot limit our growth!