Hey Reader,

Everyone seemed to really resonate with some of the previous PHP 8.4 lessons that I created, so I created a few more. These lessons are ultimately building into a larger PHP 8.4 playlist in the works.

Additionally, I have some major updates out for the exam portal + cert-prep course that is coming out 👇

P.S. There's been a lot of hubbub about Adobe Commerce's new SaaS offering — some even calling it "Magento 3" and that it makes "open source a liability". I couldn't disagree more.​

Keep coding,

Mark Shust Teacher / M.academy Say hi 👋 on LinkedIn & YouTube​

Skip parenthesis when chaining methods or properties in PHP 8.4

Such a simple update, but this new PHP 8.4 feature will make your code simpler and easier to reason about:

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Run math operations with BCMath\Number in PHP 8.4

We're working with financial figures a lot in eCommerce, and it's been a huge pain to deal with these decimal numbers in PHP — until now:

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Adobe Commerce Cert Prep course update!

I'm happy to share that I've made significant progress with building my custom exam portal, which is meant to be used in tandem with my Adobe Commerce Professional Developer cert-prep course.

The backend and frontend exam code is pretty much done. For a little behind-the-scenes, it's built in Laravel using Blade templates and very minimal JavaScript. Here's a little preview:

Making the portal look nice and have a minimal UI was a top priority of mine, and you will even be able to provide feedback or ask questions about any of the questions when taking an exam:

When you finish an exam, you'll get a complete breakdown of your answers by category, which will let you know which areas you need to study up on:

...and get a really nice detailed breakdown to analyze your question results:

There's one other feature that I'm super excited about that I held back from these screenshots, that I'll let you know more about later 😉

But the great news is that the exam portal is essentially complete and fully functional, so I've already transitioned back to work on the course-related part of this new offering.

This exam portal was a bear to build. Luckily — because of advancements with AI — I was finally able to tackle and finish this entire project by myself, and the quality of code that was written is top-notch.

I think AI is going to completely change the game of how apps are developed (it already has for me), and have some really great insights that I picked up over the last few months regarding how to build extremely high quality apps just like this.

If you'd like me to cover this in a course or YouTube video, please let me know, as I prefer to get tons of feedback before working on something like this.

I haven't set a final date of delivery for the cert-prep course, but am working my hardest to deliver the complete offering in May of this year.

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Why are you still using switch statements? While there are still a few cases to use switch statements, "match" provides a much cleaner and more elegant approach to return values based on conditions.

Find array elements with callbacks in PHP 8.4

Finding elements in arrays was always a bit tricky; but the language won't stop improving. Here are a few new built-in methods that make finding elements easier:

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