Object-Oriented PHP: Working with Inheritance

Learn how inheritance works in PHP. This tutorial explores the concept of parent and child classes; overriding methods; final classes; abstract classes, and interfaces. Example code included.

In this article we're going to explore the idea of inheritance in object-oriented programming, and how inheritance works in PHP. With inheritance, your objects and classes can become much more powerful and flexible, and you can save a lot of time and effort with your coding.

We'll look at the following topics in this article:

• The concept of inheritance, and why it's so useful
• How one PHP class can inherit from another
• How a child class can override some of the functionality of its parent
• Working with final classes and methods
• Using abstract classes, and
• Working with interfaces.