Save The Kittens! PHP Must Follows!
There’s an old adage – dating back to the 1700s – which, in English, says: “A kitten dies each time a PHP programmer doesn’t follow best practices.” Okay, not really; but just go with it!
Getting started in PHP can be a daunting experience. With that in mind, these 20 tips will teach you how to follow best practices, and save lives…kitty lives.
0. Program as Often as You Possibly Can
Programming often and with purpose will make the lessons you learn stick.
Did you study a foreign language in school? Studied all the parts of speech, learned the verbs and how to conjugate them, followed along as your teacher said common phrases?
How much of that language do you still speak?
If you’re answer is, “none,” I’m willing to bet it’s due to the fact that you never actually used the language — you only studied it. But if you can still hold up a conversation, it’s likely because you actually spent some time speaking that language outside of the learning environment. Perhaps you spent a year abroad, or worked a job where a second language was necessary?
Whatever the reason, you retained it because you used it in real-life situations and put it into a personal context that is much easier to recall later.
PHP is a foreign language, just like Spanish or French. In order to become comfortable with it, you need to use it outside of the classroom setting. Tutorials and sample projects are great for teaching the fundamentals, but unless you’re applying those concepts to your own projects, it will be much more difficult to apply those fundamentals in context and burn them into your memory.
So, don’t worry that you “don’t know enough” to build a project. When you choose your project, you have a valid reason to research and implement a concept. Programming often and with purpose will make the lessons you learn stick.
Tutorial: Object-Oriented PHP for Beginners
For many PHP programmers, object-oriented programming is a frightening concept, full of complicated syntax and other roadblocks. In this tutotial you’ll learn the concepts behind object-oriented programming (OOP), a style of coding in which related actions are grouped into classes to aid in creating more-compact, effective code.
Understanding Object-Oriented Programming
Object-oriented programming is a style of coding that allows developers to group similar tasks into classes. This helps keep code following the tenet “don’t repeat yourself” (DRY) and easy-to-maintain.
“Object-oriented programming is a style of coding that allows developers to group similar tasks into classes.”
Tutorial: Create a PHP/MySQL Powered Forum from Scratch
In this tutorial, we’re going to build a PHP/MySQL powered forum from scratch. This tutorial is perfect for getting used to basic PHP and database usage. Let’s dive right in!
Step 1: Creating Database Tables
It’s always a good idea to start with creating a good data model when building an application. Let’s describe our application in one sentence: We are going to make a forum which has users who create topics in various categories. Other users can post replies. As you can see, I highlighted a couple of nouns which represent our table names.
Users
- Categories
- Topics
- Posts
These three objects are related to each other, so we’ll process that in our table design. Take a look at the scheme below.
Looks pretty neat, huh? Every square is a database table. All the columns are listed in it and the lines between them represent the relationships. I’ll explain them further, so it’s okay if it doesn’t make a lot of sense to you right now.
Tutorial: Simple Techniques to Lock Down your Website
One crucial part of PHP development practice is always keeping in mind that security is not something you can simply buy off the shelf at your local convenient store. Ensuring the security of your web applications is a process, which over time, needs to be constantly evaluated, monitored, and hardened.
Introduction
While the use of filters and validating data is one part of the security process, a web developer should be aware that Randomization, Obfuscation, and Cryptography in PHP can make a difference in the security of web applications. This tutorial will guide you through some simple techniques at creating and using random or unique values within your web applications, taking a look and applying some general obfuscation techniques, and looking deeper into the science of Cryptology and it’s use within PHP.
What you Will Learn
- How to generate random values with PHP
- Generating random Passwords
- Salting Passwords and Authenticating The User
- Obfuscation in PHP, an Overview
- Cryptography in PHP and it’s Applications
Tutorial: Creating a Crypter Class with PHP
In this article I will explain how to create a PHP Class that will encrypt and decrypt any data with a given password. It is object programmed and uses existing PHP algorithms.
Introduction
Think about what we might need a class like this for? We want to encrypt important data with a password for security reasons. We also want, as already mentioned, to be able to decrypt that data when necessary. Why should you use symmetric algorithms? It’s easy; when you’re offering a password sent via email or something like that, you need the password to be sent in plaintext. The hash algorithms are not reversible. Once you have hashed a string you can’t decipher the original text from the hash.
Maybe you have already heard of MD5? It’s not really the best option anymore because it tends to be unsafe. There are databases around the web – that I don’t want to mention – that can be used to retrieve the plaintext from a hash simply by typing in the hash into a search box. So you should use something like SHA which was developed by the NSA (National Security Agency). SHA is the abbreviation for Secure Hash Algorithm and is one of the most secure hash algorithms. There are some others as well, such as WHIRLPOOL, PANAMA and RIPEMD, but SHA is currently the secure standard for hashes and is used in numerous applications.