An installation of PHP 7 will serve you well throughout this book. You should be prepared to alter your development environment as needed throughout this book; we will address the installation of various tools as we encounter them.

This book is not for the despairingly hostile or those who are passively antagonistic to approaching new software engineering principles. It is not for those who seek to be lone warriors, either. When altering a given code base, you must seek to improve the code of the entire code base and everyone who works on it. You must be willing to take personal responsibility of the code you write and not blame external factors. Code maintainability cannot be improved unilaterally on shared code bases; you must write your code with the intention of maintaining code quality for those who maintain it after you. Additionally, seek to go into this book with the mindset of being able to share what you’ve learned, whether it is with those in your teams, your user groups, or the larger PHP community. In other words, approach this book with the end in mind; approach this book with the stated aim of improving your code and those in the code base you maintain.