PHP is the most established language in terms of history for the developers and programmers. Despite being so popular, this language suffers from hacks, bends, twists and sometimes becomes highly inconsistent and buggy. It has become hard to track the problems of all versions as each one has its own quirks and warts. It’s worth following certain best practices, guidelines and methodologies when developing applications to avoid the flaws and to create seamless websites.

Become a professional PHP developer by following these best practices of the language before building anything with it:

Keep Your PHP Up-to-date

Get New language features, lower memory usage, security updates, improved speed, and more with regular upgrades. Ensure performance improvements and less painful process by keeping current PHP. With every new release, there are security improvements and some bug fixes. Keep your PHP up to date and make programming life a lot easier and interesting.

Single Quoted vs. Doubles Quoted Strings

It is more efficient to go for single quotes if you have a simple string to display. But if you have special characters and variables in your string like “t”, “n”, then use double quotes. Double quotes take more execution time whereas Single quotes don’t need to sort through the Code for escaped characters. Understand the difference between single quotes and double quotes and use them accordingly.

Use Meaningful Variable and Function Names in Your Code

Use generic and meaningful names everywhere that make sense for your functions and classes. Using grammatically sensible names and being consistent with the standards you are following will help people to understand your convention easily and quickly. So, avoid improper names to eliminate inefficiency and wastage of valuable time.

Keep Functions Outside of Loops

Get a severe hit on performance by using functions inside of loops. The smaller the loop, the lesser the execution time will take. There is no need to think about the extra time and line of code to place the function outside of the loop. By following this practice you will reduce the complexities of the program for larger loops.

Learn the DRY Approach

Don’t Repeat Yourself is a concept in software engineering and can be applied to any programming language like C++, Java and more. It prevents redundant code, thereby making your website more maintainable and flexible.

Avoid Deep Nesting

Prevent deep nesting levels to ensure readability of the code. Excessive nesting makes logic hard to follow, thereby making your code difficult to read. Larger methods with lots of nested loops and if statements can result in mess of logical workflows.

Use Adequate Comments

Annotate your code by using inline comments. This standard practice should be followed to help you to find anything in the code when you are looking back. Analyze your code base, make maintenance much easier and find bugs faster by using adequate comments.

Turning on Error Reporting for Development Purposes

Spot errors and various problems during PHP application development with the PHP function, error_reporting (). This function makes your code flawless and bug free. Various levels of error reporting are available in PHP and you can also use E_ALL to report all types of errors. Disable error reporting when you are done with the development process.

Try a PHP Framework

Speed up your development by using web framework that bundles with functionality. The framework helps the developer to code faster by providing them the standardized way of creating web applications. Lesser the code, the less you will have to test and debug.

Go OOP

Easily perform the basic tasks, remove the need for repetition of code and tie like things together with OOP. It is simpler, faster, uses less server resources, easier to debug, requires less coding and logical to work with once you understand the basic principles.

Indentation, White Spacing and Line Length

Maintain a proper coding standard by specifically considering white spaces, indentation and line lengths. For easy readability, keep the line length less than 80 characters. Always use 4 spaces of indentation and avoid using tabs as different computers has different tabs. The main aim is to make your code look clean and easily Debuggable by other programmers.

Conclusion

Learning a new programming language is difficult and can be a huge undertaking. Being a PHP beginner apply these best practices to enhance your application performance and develop code in an efficient manner, so that you don’t have to come back and break yourself of any bad habits.

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