Jake, those are exactly the sort of tips I was looking for--thanks so
much for the advice and for wishing me luck.
Bev
Jake McGraw wrote:
Couple of suggestions:
1. Really read the documentation available at php.net, it is the best
resource available online. At the very least, go through the the
Language Reference section (although you can ignore the sections
pertaining to PHP4). Additionally, anytime you're doing something with
a string or array, see if there is a function available for what
you're doing. I'd say 90% of the time someone has already done the
hard work and all you need to do is read the documentation. As a short
cut, typing "http://www.php.net/foobar"; into the address bar will
automatically search the PHP function list for any functions like
"foobar".
2. Learn a templateing system, my personal favorite is Smarty
[smarty.php.net] and get all of your HTML out of your PHP code. This
ties into a larger lesson for all programmers, that is learning
Model-View-Controller pattern
[wikpedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller].
3. See how the pros do it, download Drupal [drupal.org/download] or
Vanilla [getvanilla.com] or some other Open Source PHP project and
look at some of the conventions these developers employ. You need not
review every line, but get an idea for how these people organize their
code. Install the framework and see how things work.
That is how I've done things and I feel like I'm getting there. FYI, I
started using PHP professionally about 2 years ago, but most of what I
learned, I've accumulated in the last 6 months working as the sole
developer for a major PHP application. You won't necessary move on
from a noob to pro by just reading the documentation and doing the
exercises, find something to work on (maybe write your own database
driven blog) and throw yourself into it.
Good luck!
- jake
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