There'll be times when, as an aspiring PHP developer faced with a new project, you'll think that the mountain ahead of you seems almost impossible to climb.
Finding the right psychological starting point can be tricky for the best of us, but one of the most satisfying things to discover at the start of the project is that half of what you figured you'd have to write has already been written.
As your portfolio of PHP projects matures, you'll find that you can reuse much of your own code from previous projects (yet another reason why taking a modular, object-oriented approach to your work is highly recommended). So-called "search-and-replace" development has saved thousand of engineer hours over the years.
There will be times, of course, when you simply have nothing to fall back on. Some components can be immensely time-consuming to develop without actually contributing to the core ethos of your project. That is when the "blank canvas" syndrome can kick in, and the urge to make just one more cup of coffee before you get started takes hold.
Thankfully, there is an answer: a repository of thousands of useful, fully tested, re-usable PHP components, all of which are broadly free to use and include in your own application.
In this chapter, you explore this repository; and discover why it exists, and how it can help you. You find out when—and when not—to use it. Most importantly, you learn how to identify the components most relevant to your project, and how to integrate them into your application.
