Sometimes when defining a function in PHP, you find that there may be cases where you do not want to specify all the possible parameters when calling it. This could be because you want it to use a default value, or that in certain cases it does not logically apply. If you find yourself in [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Beginners' Corner category.
Beginners’ Corner: Learning Object-Oriented PHP
I often see PHP newbies (and even not-so-newbies) who are confused by the world of object-oriented programming (OOP). At least part of this confusion results from the vast majority of introductory books and tutorials for PHP beginning by teaching procedural programming techniques, treating OOP as an “advanced” subject with a chapter or two at the [...]
Beginners’ Corner: Avoid Bad Habits
This is the first “Beginners’ Corner” article, designed to help new PHP programmers in their quest to become veteran PHP programmers. In this initial installment we’ll look at a few things which are best avoided, but for various reasons often become habits of new PHP users who do not yet know better. Many of these [...]
Beginners’ Corner: The Dreaded Blank Page
[2008/07/15: Added this to the "Beginners' Corner" category]
A common problem I see new PHP users running into is having a script output absolutely nothing: the dreaded “blank page” syndrome. This is normally due to a syntax error of some sort generating a fatal parse error. As this error is generated before any of the script [...]