One of the biggest criticisms aimed at WordPress and many of the developers within our ecosystem is the overuse of procedural coding and lack of proper object-oriented coding principles.

It’s a topic that’s been discussed over and over, including an episode on the Mastermind.fm show. In fact, Carl Alexander, one of the major OOP evangelists in the WP world, was on that show. The great news is that he has just released a course about object-oriented programming in WordPress. Together with Tom McFarlin and Alain Schlesser he has been one of my goto people in WordPress whenever I wanted to recommend learning materials to people getting started with programming in WordPress.

There are 4 packages to choose from, starting from the cheapest at $39 for the book in PDF format, and going all the way to $999 package that includes two code review sessions for your team. I think the latter is a great option if you’re assembling a team that’s building WordPress products and want to make sure that all your developers are following sound patterns when building the products.

For everyone else, I would highly recommend the $249 complete package.

The reason being that you not only get the book and the exercises + solutions, but you get the benefit of having in-depth screencasts in which Carl clearly explains all the steps he is using to solve the exercises. I found them particularly helpful as he also explains different alternatives that could be used to solve an exercise, and why one might be preferable over the other.

Overall this is one of the best resources in the WordPress programming niche, and I wholeheartedly recommend this course. I’ve been waiting for an OOP-related course in WordPress for many years, and I’m very happy that Carl has taken the step of putting in all this work to create the course. I hope he continue expanding on it and I also hope others will follow his example and blog and write more about OOP in WordPress.

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