Time and time again, I come across code that contains a variety of array-handling functions that too often duplicate the work that the PHP core team has done to develop built-in array functions. Since the built-in functions are inherently faster, trying to reimplement them in PHP will inevitably be a performance problem. Here are five [...]

PHP allows developers to write a variety of different styles of code: procedural, object-oriented, or simply scripts. This flexibility makes PHP easy to learn, and also means that new developers to PHP may not be programmers in other languages.

When setting up a web server with PHP, there are a number of settings that are critical to consider. PHP 5.3 contains both a development INI file and a production INI file; however, users of older PHP releases (or those who don’t have direct control over their INI files) will want to pay attention and [...]

One of the most confusing things for new programmers (and it even trips me up sometimes) is how to test for boolean conditions in code. As developers, we want to develop code that never emits notices or warnings, and PHP gets a bit antsy when we develop code that utilizes uninitialized variables. Lucky for us, [...]

Sometimes I have to check an array for the existence of a value; for example, I may want to parse an array for a value and then include (or exclude) that value fro an SQL query. I quickly found out that using in_array() is slower than using isset(). For example: