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01.

SOLID: The Good, The Bad & The Real World

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Hey friends! Welcome to our long awaited tutorial on the principles of SOLID: single responsibility principle, open closed principle, Liskov substitution principle, interface segregation principle and, my personal favorite: the donut in face principle. Probably... actually known as the dependency inversion principle.

I want to thank my coauthor Diego for helping me finally put this tutorial together. And I'm super sorry if you've been waiting for this!

SOLID Principles: I don't Love Them

So... why did it take us so long to get this tutorial done? The short answer is: I.... kind of don't like the SOLID principles. Okay, let me rephrase that. The SOLID principles are tough to understand. And, in my most humble opinion, they're not always good advice! It depends on the situation. For example, you should write code for your application differently than you would write code that's meant to be open sourced and shared.

If you want to know a bit more about why SOLID might not always be correct, you can read a recent blog post written by Dan North called CUPID – THE BACK STORY. Dan North is known for being the person who first made behavior-driven development famous. You may have heard of him if you're a Behat user.

Anyways, this tutorial is not going to be yet another tutorial where we read the definition of each SOLID principle in a monotone voice... and slowly get lost, bored and finally fall asleep. Nope. We're going to dive into each principle, learn what they really mean - using normal human words - code some real examples and discuss why and when following these principles makes sense and does not make sense. But even when the SOLID principles should not be followed, they have a lot to teach us. So strap in for a wild ride.

Project Setup

Since we're going to be doing some real coding, let's get the project set up and rocking. Do me a solid by downloading the course code from this page and unzipping it. After you do, you'll find a start/ directory with the same code you see here. This fancy README.md file has all the details about how to get the project up and running. The last step will be to find a terminal, move into the project and start a local web server. I'll use the Symfony binary for this:

symfony serve -d

Once this finishes, copy that URL, spin back over to your browser, paste and... say hello to "Sasquatch Sightings"! Our latest effort to find the infamous Bigfoot. What this code actually does is... not too important. It talks to a database, lists some big foot sightings and has some calculations. It will be our playground for diving into the SOLID principles.

So next, let's start with the first: the single responsibility principle!