PHP 7—the most dramatic update to the language in over a decade—has arrived. This O’Reilly report provides you with a short guide to the major changes in this new release, including a revamped engine (Zend Engine 3), a bunch of new features, and lots of language cleanup. You’ll learn about basic language changes, deprecated features, Unicode enhancements, changes in Object-Oriented programming, and other enhancements. You’ll also discover why it’s taken more than 10 years for the first new major version of PHP since PHP 5 to appear—and what happened to version 6 in the meantime. Get important details regarding changes to PHP 7, including: Deprecated features, starting with alternative PHP tags and POSIX-compatible regular expressions Uniform Variable Syntax, including consistency fixes and new syntax Basic language changes, such as new operators, constant arrays, new functions, and regular expressions Expectations and Assertions Error handling Enhancements to PHP’s Unicode, closure, and Generator features Changes in Object-Oriented programming Scalar type hints (perhaps the most polarizing and exciting new feature)