I have been writing PHP without "classes" for years... what am I missing?

Question

For the life of me, I can't seem to wrap my head around "classes" in PHP.

I have managed to write large, scalable, and popular websites without them.

What am I missing? (And how do I learn?)

Answer 1

Classes will help with code re-use and potentially a very structured application.

Procedural programming can be a lot faster in both development time and execution speed.

OO programming is the more mainstream way but not always the best way. Theres a book called PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice which is a very good read, it covers the basics of classes, why and how to use, abstraction and common design patterns such as MVC. It also covers unit testing and other very good practices for php developers

Answer 2

The point of classes (object oriented programming) is that it bundles data together with the code that operates on it. If done well, this leads to less tightly coupled and thus more maintainable code.

In practice it means fewer global variables (whether used directly or accessed through static factory methods) and lesss passing around of data (i.e. smaller method signatures).

For a concrete example, look at the Mysqli extension: each function has a procedural and an OOP version, and the procedural version nearly always needs to have an extra "link" parameter to give it context, wheras the OOP version gets that context from the current object.