Too many books on best practices read like a manual. They are dry, boring and cover topics that you don't care about. "Do This, Not That" is different. A collection of essays, it highlights those areas for which best practices are either not well known or not well defined. It offers clear solutions that will be easy to implement. I've taken the time to research and identify what I feel are the best practices, and condensed it into a two hour read that will leave you feeling empowered, not exhausted.

If this sounds interesting to you, you can pick up a copy on the official site for about $30 USD and, if you're more of a try-before-you-buy sort, you can read a sample chapter covering type hinting.

This is why I decided to setup a simple website, that pretty much tries to answer any question about REST. It's not completed yet.. Actually, it hasn't got many posts to begin with :), but a start has been made and we will fill it with questions and answers about REST and HTTP issues.

As of the time of this post, it only has a few articles, but they're a good start like:

• when to use PATCH
• when to send 400 or 500 codes
• handling an unsatisfied accept-language header

This great series of highly focused e-books will offer tips, tricks and best practices focused on core areas of PHP development, including databases, security, filtering, regular expressions, configuration and more. Since it will be a series of tightly targeted solutions, developers will be able to pick all, some or just one of the offerings that solves their specific problem(s).

This excerpt looks at private method use in your applications and why they could be considered "evil" if not used correctly.

[Outdated tutorials and information is] one of the reasons why new PHP programmers are so frequently blamed for ugly, outdated, or insecure code. They can't help it if the first Google result was a four year old article teaching a five year old method! This document tries to address that. It's an attempt to compile a set of basic instructions for what can be considered best practices for common and confusing issues and tasks in PHP. If a low-level task has multiple and confusing approaches in PHP, it belongs here.

The site has sections for topics like:

• PHP & MySQL
• Single vs Double Quotes
• PHP regular expressions
• Validating emails
• Checking null and false values

If you're interested in helping out and adding more content to the site, contain the maintainer and let him know.

Every day I come across code that is insecure. Sometimes the code is so hilariously insecure that any 10 year old could break it. I've also gotten into discussions with people who should know better about their practices. It's very, how to put this, disheartening. It's sad that the average developer knows (and cares) so little about proper security practices. So, I've put together a simple pledge (or manifesto, if you'd like).

The pledge includes the ideas of data storage techniques, taking responsibility for user data, reusing existing/tested libraries instead of writing your own and being open to constantly learning. He elaborates on each point, giving a little context for each.

Are you a secure programmer? Do you want to be? Then take the pledge, and fight for the security of your applications. It's all of our responsibility, so do your part!

I have created PHPeasy with the aim of providing tutorials, tips, code snippets and news on the subject of PHP. I rarely get the opportunity to discuss PHP and share thoughts with other like minded developers, so I'm hoping that this blog will allow me to do that. I aim to provide resources that will be useful to coders of all levels, whether a newbie or master I'm hoping that there will be something for everyone.

It's a relatively new site, but there's already a series posted (parts 1-3) about some of the basics of working with object-oriented programming in PHP:

• Classes and Objects
• Accessor Methods
• Connecting to MySQL using PDO

There's a lot of bad information on the Web (I'm looking at you, W3Schools) that leads new PHP users astray, propagating bad practices and bad code. This must stop. PHP: The Right Way is an easy-to-read, quick reference for PHP best practices, accepted coding standards, and links to authoritative tutorials around the Web. It is important to understand there is no canonical way to use PHP. That's the beauty of it. This website introduces new PHP developers to best practices, available options, and good information.

The site has some "getting started" tips for working with PHP 5.4, links to some of the current PSR standards and gets into some of the best practices for things like proper OOP structure, namespacing and using the SPL. There's also hints on using Composer for package management, working with databases and some basic parts on security and testing.

Additionally, the site is also an open source project so you can contribute your own content (it'll have to be approved before merging) on topics you might not see or want to improve.

PHP is widely used for various of web development. However, misconfigured server-side scripting would create all sorts of problem. And here are php security best practices that you should aware when configuring PHP securely. Nowadays most of the web servers are operated under Linux environment (like: Ubuntu, Debian...etc). Hence, in the following article, I am going to use list top 10 ways to enhance PHP Security Best Practices under Linux environment.

His tips include:

• Reducing the built-in PHP modules
• Logging all PHP errors
• Disabling remote code execution
• Disabling dangerous PHP functions
• Write protection on Apache, PHP & MySQL configuration files

[I spent so] much time in fact that in 2010 I penned more than 130 articles. Many of these articles focused on PHP-specific best practices and productivity, two topics which should resonate closely with anybody involved in building websites for a living. So I thought it would be useful to compile a list of the sixteen tutorials which touch upon these topics. In this list you'll find tutorials introducing testing, debugging, advanced object-oriented features, code profiling, security, enforcing coding standards, and more.

His list of articles includes:

• 10 Productive PHP Tools for Testing and Debugging
• Three Advanced Object-Oriented PHP Features You Need to Know
• Four Sane Solutions for PHP Debugging
• Enforcing Coding Standards with PHP_CodeSniffer
• Use PHPUnit to Implement Unit Testing in Your PHP Development

Welcome to the ZendCon 2010 edition of the ZendCon Sessions. The ZendCon Sessions are live recordings of sessions that have been given at previous Zend Conferences. Combined with the slides, they can be the next best thing to having attended the conference itself. [...] This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2010 in Santa Clara, CA and features Shahar Evron giving his talk: "Best Practices in PHP Application Deployment"

This new episode can be listened to in a few ways - either in-page, downloaded or by subscribing to their feed. You can also find the slides on SlideShare.