stefano

Avoid unnecessary control structures. Brackets everywhere. Try to get rid of those as much as you can. Unnecessary brackets add visual complexity and make your code much longer. In real world situation, when you need to quickly browse through your code, they just add clutter //prints out the structure of a table function describe( $table ) { $query = “SHOW COLUMNS FROM `$table `”; $result =mysql_query( $query ); if ( ! $result ) { return …

Thoughtful minimalism Think about the most concise, clear and readable way to write the code your writing. Assume you were writing a function to get a file extension (.gif, .doc, etc.). You could be tempted to use string manipulation functions. $filename = ‘file.doc’; $dot_position = strpos( $filename, ‘.’ ); if ( $dot_position !== false ) { $extension = substr( $filename, $dot_position + 1 ); } var_dump($extension) It’s a lot of code for such a simple …

Get your brackets right ..and indent your code properly, always. Always give to each of your curly brackets their very own line. I am taking a snippet from Kohana to demonstrate this. (bad) What do you think of this code ? if ( ! is_array($data)){ if (strpos($data, ‘[') !== FALSE) {$data = preg_replace('/\[.*\]/’, ”, $data); }$data = empty($data) ? array() : array(‘for’ => $data);} (not nice) This is much better if ( ! is_array($data)){ if …

What I found. Oh! Look, look ! As old-schoolers know Deja News, an historical Usenet repository was lately acquired by Google some year ago for Google Groups service, still conserves intact pieces of story of the web. Searching in google for google groups php at the first place what I found is (suspance): Rasmus Lerdorf’s first PHP stable release announce!!