What should every PHP programmer know?

I would like to be a PHP/MySQL programmer

What are the technologies that I must know?

Like:

1. Frameworks
2. IDEs
3. Template Engines
4. Ajax and CSS Frameworks

Please tell me the minimum requirements that I must know, and tell me your favourite things in the previous list?

Thanks

First of all, that PHP itself IS a templating system

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.

Use a great IDE (like Eclipse for example) that let you debug and have some code completion. This will save you some time.

PHP have a lot of programmer and is very popular = a lot of thing is already done for you, before writing some code, doing a google search is always a good idea.

You should use some of the Framework if you start from scratch. This will answer all your question about AJax, template engines... because most of them come with these packages.
Here is some post about how to start choosing a framework: [SO 1][1], [SO2][2], Here is [a list of PHP][3] Framework.

You can develop PHP on Windows, Linux or Mac.


[1]:

[To see links please register here]

[2]:

[To see links please register here]

[3]:

[To see links please register here]

You need to learn the following (I would suggest in this order):

1. <b>Basic</b> Object-Oriented Principles (such as inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation)
2. The PHP language itself. Specifically, PHP 5.
3. Database Design Principles such as tables, keys, relationships, normalization, etc.
4. SQL - Structured (or Standard never can remember which) Query Language. Specifically learn the basics of select, insert, update, and delete queries.
5. Good design principles and coding practices (you can find posts here on StackOverflow for one) such as dividing presentation and business logic.
6. A Framework, Any Framework - this will help you become introduced to more advanced concepts of object-oriented design patterns and allow you to follow tutorials that will encourage good design and coding practices.
7. Object-Oriented Design Patterns like MVC, Database Abstraction Models and the like
8. Advanced SQL and other database stuff like triggers, stored procedures, and other functions.

Although this isn't a technology, I think it's very important that you understand that, when using PHP, it is completely on you to write good code. PHP is capable of it, but it does not encourage it. You are completely responsible for writing code that is well designed and, if you choose, follows OO principles. You will have no help from the language.

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.

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.

That every value everywhere has to be encoded appropriately. `echo $some_variable_that_seems_innocent` is evil nine times out of ten.

Use `htmlspecialchars()` in HTML/XML, prepared statements or at least `addslashes()` when building SQL queries, `json_encode()` when inserting values into scripts, `rawurlencode()` when appending URL components, `escapeshellargs()` when constructing shell commands, etc.

If you insert text in URL that's part of a script in XHTML document, you'll need to encode data three times.

Security is an important topic every web programmer should study before being allowed to post code that can be accessed publicly on the internet.

Examples of security issues:

- [Injection flaws][1]
- [Cross-site scripting flaws][2]
- [Cross-site request forgery][3]

There are more security issues that you should know and keep in mind as you write PHP applications. The website

[To see links please register here]

contains lots of useful [information][4] to help.


[1]:

[To see links please register here]

[2]:

[To see links please register here]

[3]:

[To see links please register here]

[4]:

[To see links please register here]