I am going through this book written in 2009 ( it is now 2013 ) so when I came across the User class presented in chapter 7, I had some questions.

My question is why didn't the authors use the PHP magic methods "__get()", and "__set()"?

Were they not available at the time of writing? Also this class uses the "eval" function. Isn't that bad practice?

EDIT: I found the following on the PHP website http://php.net/manual/en/function.eval.php

Just wondering, and if anyone can help me out that would be great.