Introduction

[MUSIC] 0:00 [NOISE] PHP, a language belittled by many yet still used by millions of 0:04 websites around the world to power about 80% of the internet. 0:07 How does it manage this? 0:11 Well, on one hand, it's very, very easy to knock out really simple websites. 0:13 On the other hand, these sites can be insecure or have terrible code quality. 0:17 To keep the benefits of PHP's ease of use, but 0:21 improve our code quality, we can focus on standards and best practices. 0:23 My name's Phil Sturgeon and I've been using PHP for over a decade, 0:28 I've been involved with some popular open source projects like CodeIgniter, 0:32 FuelPHP and Piracy MS. 0:35 I've released code that is being used by Apple, Google, Facebook and 0:38 the US government, all written in PHP. 0:42 Over the years I've seen my PHP code go from terrible to reasonable following 0:46 an awful amount of trial and error and a massive amount of research. 0:49 These days PHP has a lot more high quality resources out there and 0:53 we will look through a few of those to help us write better PHP. 0:56 There are also some standards created by various bodies around the internet, 1:00 like the IETF, who work on things like the HTTP spec, and W3C, 1:03 who are responsible for HTML. 1:08 Generally, it's a group of people who [SOUND] theoretically know a thing or 1:10 two, who come together to hash out standards which everyone can then follow. 1:13 Best practices and general advice is passed on from developer to developer to 1:16 help people avoid common problems, things like interacting with data stores, 1:20 cashing, security, designing how you write your code, and anything else, really. 1:24 Basically, in this video, we can help you skip a few months or 1:30 years of getting things wrong with PHP, so you can get on with doing things right, 1:32 like making awesome software. 1:36