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, [...]

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 [...]

With the introduction of PHP 5, the PHP Data Object was introduced as core functionality. PHP 5.1 turned on a minimum level of support for SQLite, by default, and PDO supports most of the major database engines. PDO offers a number of enhancements and improvements over the various database libraries (e.g. mysql_*, mysqli_*, pg_*), the [...]

Nearly five years ago I started writing PHP code for fun. I had a project that I was working on, and I needed some sort of a programming language that would do calculations for me, and hopefully make managing a website easier. So I wrote my first web application.

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.