30+ PHP Best Practices for Beginners
- By admin
- 15 June, 2012
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PHP is the most widely-used language for programming on the web. Here are thirty best practices for beginners wanting to gain a firmer grasp of the fundamentals.
Editor’s Note: The “Best Practices” series has been my baby for three articles now. However, due to my focus on the CI video series, I’ve decided to hand off this next entry to Glen. Having said that, I’m not very good at keeping my mouth shut! I thought it might be fun to sporadically add a few rebuttals to his tips. I hope he doesn’t mind!
1. Befriend the PHP Manual
If you’re new to PHP, then it’s time to get acquainted with the awesomeness that is the PHP manual. The PHP manual is incredibly thorough and has truly helpful comments following each article. Before asking questions or trying to figure out an issue on your own, save some time and just head straight to the manual. Odds are the answer to your question is already nestled in a helpful article at the PHP.net site.
2. Turn on Error Reporting
Error reporting in PHP is very helpful. You’ll find bugs in your code that you might not have spotted earlier, as not all bugs keep the application from working. There are different levels of strictness in the reporting that you can use, but E_ALL will show you the most errors, critical and warnings alike.
Once you’ve gotten your application ready for production, you’ll want to turn off error reporting, or your visitors will see strange errors that they don’t understand.