I know there's those of you out there that work with PHP day in and day out, as well as those that just casually use PHP to make those little "in between" scripts that make things flow much more smoothly. One of the things that I'm sure you gurus out there have heard about, but may not understand is something called references. These are pointers (or references) to the value of another variable, and this article from the O'Reilly network helps to explain them a little bit further.

They give you a good code comparison with the output to show you the effect of references in PHP. The "&" character is used to create these references and "link" the two variables together. One thing that these are extremely useful for is passing objects around, so that you can update them outside of their scope, without having to pass a lot of values back to the object and assign them there.

This article is the first part in a series about references, and is just meant to give you an idea about how to use them and how they can benefit you.