What should every PHP programmer know? [closed]

Answer 1

What should every PHP programmer know ?

You need to know a language that is not PHP. I'm not saying you shouldn't develop your sites in PHP, it's actually really good for that, but you really need to know at least one other language to get some perspective.

Why? PHP is broken and full of bad design and misfeatures. You can write excellent code in PHP, but you're never going to be able to spot the bad design and failures of PHP itself if you don't know any better.

I'd suggest python, ruby, or C#

PS: If you don't think this is a helpful suggestion, then by all means downmod this answer, but if you are downmodding because you feel insulted by my claim that PHP is broken and badly designed, don't shoot the messenger, I'm just telling the truth!

Answer 2

I would say a basic one would be HTML. ;)

Answer 3

You should know how to use effectively at least one Debugger/IDE. It is amazing what you can learn from your code by stepping through it and watching it run. It both makes it much simpler to track down bugs, and improves the quality of your code. I believe you should never commit code to a project that you haven't seen execute.

Answer 4

Be careful of code snippets you find on the web. Often they contain sql in html, which is bad practice, as well as security vulnerabilities such as sql injection. I've seen few that use prepared statements, which is good for security.

Answer 5

I would say the most important thing is to learn how the whole process of building a page with PHP works - in that requests come from a client (web browser), hit the web server, get passed through to PHP, which then generates the response that is sent back. A solid understanding of this will ground you in

• why you can't send headers after output has started
• how sessions and cookies work
• how each page should be built in a stateless manner (i.e. deliver whatever the request asks for, don't remember what happened last time, or guess what the user is doing)
• The difference between HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS, and more importantly, what each is used for primarily and where the responsibility of each lies.

Once you've got that down, then you should be quite comfortable with writing any app. But unless you've got that down, you'll start mixing things as I've seen many rookies do before now.

Answer 6

Security.

Just like Lucas Oman said - it is up to you in PHP to write the code well; and it does not coddle you. If you don't understand why you need to confirm a logout, or why you can't just validate in javascript, or why register_globals is bad - your app will be vulnerable in some form or another.