Learning PHP & MySQL, 2nd Edition

Chapter 18. Finishing Your Journey

You’ve created a blog. You’ve started out learning the ins and outs of dynamic web development, and how the Internet world is changing rapidly. Dynamic web sites are what clients, your employer, and your volunteer organizations—or even just you—desire. While static pages have their place in web development, new tools such as Ajax and Ruby are stepping-stones after learning PHP and MySQL.

This chapter will arm you with numerous resources that can help you during your PHP and MySQL journey.

PHP Coding Standards

As you’ve probably guessed, this standard is a document that shows proper format and syntax for variable names, control structures, and much more. These format and syntax recommendations help you minimize coding errors. Currently, some sites that address this include:

• http://srparish.net/writings/php_code_standards.html

• http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/35/0.php

• http://www.phpcommunity.org/node/139

We’re going to do a minor recap of some of the important concepts covered throughout the book along with code examples. This is just a refresher to jog your brain into remembering a lot of the content you’ve already digested.

Comments

Some basic coding standards are comments that help you remember what your code is doing. You may need to go back and look at code you wrote several months ago. What seems straightforward now may take considerable time to discern later unless you leave some meaningful explanations. Remember that PHP uses the same style for ...