Everyone has to start out somewhere with a language, and PHP is no exception. Sure, it's easy to learn and the manual is laid out wonderfully (one of the best out there, in my opinion). But there's still no way that you can know all of it from memory, and there's always those random functions that wil sneak up on you when you least expect it.

DevArticles.com has a new piece this morning on just that. 10 PHP Functions I Bet You Didn't Know About! details some of the lesser used functions that are still wonderfully powerful and easy to use. Some examples include: parse_url, set_error_handler, and function_exists.

There's so many parts of PHP that most people never touch - and I still hear about people (especially people starting out) writing a rather large script to do something that a single function that was already there could have done. My advice is to scour the manual first if what you're doing sounds like something that "should have a function". And, chances are, it's probably called just what you'd think (hooray for naming schemes!).