Classes. What's the point?

Question

I\'m fairly new to OOP in PHP, I\'ve made a couple of basic scripts but nothing impressive. All I\'ve really taken from it is that it would probably be easier just make a co

Answer 1

A big advantage to OOP is code reuse. An example: Say you design a generic "Socket" class, which communicates with a server at a very low level. Then, I may come along and decide that I want to write an FTP class, which allows a user to download files while connected to an FTP server. I can "subclass" your Socket class and extend its functionality to support FTP, without rewriting your code.

Now, say John wants to write an HTTP class, to interact with HTTP servers. He, too, can subclass your Socket class to accomplish this, without rewriting the low level socket code.

Notice how in this example there was no duplication of socket code; both me and John shared it. Code duplication is bad because if there is an error in the duplicated code, the exact same bug may occur somewhere else in your code and you may not realize it.

More detailed information about classes can be found on Wikipedia.