Uncommon advice to a newbie

[Chousho]

I've been reading about 3 books back and forth dealing with PHP (mostly) and MySQL. From your experience, what would you say is a common thing left out that you've learned to do, add, take away that isn't usually in the books? Security, performance, anything.

[Zachery]

Real expirence, I'd guess, In all of my training as far as anything goes, nothing prepares you like real expirecies of learning and working with code, servers, etc.

And somethings might not behave as they are said to

[feldon23]

I find the PHP User Manual to be surprisingly good about telling you which functions are better than others for certain purposes and includes some of the problems people experience.

[Toneboy]

Bit of a strange one, but I hope it will help you. It comes in two parts.

1) If you receive an error code on one of your pages look above the error line. A lot of times you'll find you missed a semi-colon, bracket, etc., which becomes a pain to try and find again.

2) Use an editor which shows line numbers. Trying to find a specific line number when the line numbers aren't indicated can become a nightmare.

[feldon23]

UltraEdit is my fav all-purpose script/text editor.

[roosevelt]

I rely on Zend Development Environment for 100% php work and some javascript. In my opinion there really to take out, but to put in more stuff. Whatever you read in the books are important in the writer's view. I recommend you to read multiple books and you could see different authors uses different coding styles, methods. So what I did read two books, saw a video tutorials and simply came up with my way of coding.

[Chousho]

I rely on Zend Development Environment for 100% php work and some javascript. In my opinion there really to take out, but to put in more stuff. Whatever you read in the books are important in the writer's view. I recommend you to read multiple books and you could see different authors uses different coding styles, methods. So what I did read two books, saw a video tutorials and simply came up with my way of coding.

Oh, that sounds somewhat like what I am trying to do. The only thing is the authors tend to go over different things whenever they feel it is important (or used for an example). I guess this could be a two way sword, in that I can get 2 different things down, but so far I am just confused, haha.

I am more of a visual learner, so am interested in what videos you saw (or would recommend).