I don't really understand the Parent::__construct($name, $price, $desc) Part

Rodger,

fantastic, thank you! That's very helpful. So, if I understand right--both result in an inheritance of the parent's properties, but "extends" add the ability to add more properties and methods. Simpler than I thought.

They way I understand it, which is admittedly not very well, the first example is creating a new Employee named bob. Bob is the object, and the type (or "class") of object is an Employee. Without Bob, there aren't any actual Employees, just the concept of an employee.

The second example would be creating a new type of object–a "bob" type of object. But there are still no actual Employees (objects), just a second type of Employee. You could then make Employee objects of the "bob" type, which I have decided to call "bobjects" because reasons. A bobject would have the same properties and methods as an Employee, but bobjects can then have properties and methods of their own.

Not to say this process is useless. Bobjects could be a perfectly valid type of object. Perhaps the "bob" object is referring to every employee named "Bob".

$slydell = new bob();
$porter = new bob();

In the first code you are creating a new instance of an object.

For the latter you are creating a new object template, which inherits some traits from the parent class.

Take the following analogy as an example:

$bob = new Employee();

Let's say the all the Employee() in this company have 2 properties - they all wear red uniform, and get paid $40 an hour, and they all have 1 duty, a method called buildRockets()

$bob, an employee no different than any other employees, wears red uniform, gets $40 per hour, and builds rockets.

Also, after invoking this function, we have an employee called $bob in the company.

class Scientist extends Employee()

In this example we've created a new employee template, the scientists. We can modify the Scientist class so that they wear white uniform.

In this case, if you created a new Scientist employee, the scientist will also get paid $40 per hour, also build rockets, but they wear white uniforms.

Furthermore, at the time you declared this class, no actual scientist has been created - you've only just created a new employee template called scientist.

Hope silly analogy helps :)