If you're a new developer and are trying to hone in on your coding style, maybe try giving the following a go. These are simply some conventional formatting methods that are generally appreciated and supported by PHP developers and will improve the overall readability of your code.

They talk about a few different subjects - variable names, class and method naming, bracket spacing, default arguments, constants, loops and a lot more. It's good to see them including things like commenting and file name suggestions.

The simple answer is that whomever designed the form decided to place the validation of the data, and its massaging into the proper format, onto the end user. But there's a more complicated issue at hand here: the fact that the developer either felt it wasn't his responsibility to do the data formatting, or didn't realize that not everyone would think to [input the data] way he does.

He suggests that it's more out of laziness on the part of the developer to want the user to give them the data in the format they want when, really, the application should take reasonably correct (it has to match the type they're looking for, after all) and massage it to what they need. If it doesn't cooperate after this, only then should they toss an error. His examples touch on phone number and date formatting.

In part two of this series, I discussed the technical know how I think will help get you your next PHP job. This part will discuss writing your Curriculum Vitae(CV, resume, etc.). There are a lot of contrasting opinions on this subject, I'll make a few points, give you some further reading and you can adapt the opinions in to a top notch CV of your own. I'm no major expert and most of the recruitment I have been involved in has been for trainee developers, but these positions attract a high number of CVs, so I've seen a fair few.

He includes a few helpful hints like "Your CV does not get you a job", "Don't stuff your CV with keywords/acronyms" and some tips on formatting and proofreading.

Writing readable code means proper indentation. Usually you'd tab (or use 2 or 4 or 3 spaces) after every curly bracket. [...] Same goes when you have a bigger hash/object sort of thing [...] But recently, inspired by Firebug's Net panel way of presenting header information, I tried aligning the keys to the right in addition to aligning the values to the left.

Check out the entry for examples of each of these techniques and see which might fit your programming style the best. Personally, the align right style looks nice but could be more of a pain than it's worth to force my editor into.

Needless to say, I was quite disappointed when I came to find out that Zend_Pdf doesn't currently have any type of text layout support except for the exact position to place it. I created a small extension to Zend_Pdf, and building off of an idea from FPDF, I created Zend_Pdf_Cell.

His code is not officially included into the Framework, but has been posted for anyone to use if they might need it. It includes features like: the ability to create a cell and put text inside, position a cell, specify the height/width and format it with different fonts.

He also includes installation instructions (copy the file over, basically) and usage examples to get you started.