Good Practice in PHP

Or "Things I Wish New Recruits Knew"

About Me

Lorna Mitchell

Twitter: @lornajane

PHP consultant, trainer, and author

I live in Leeds

Website: http://lornajane.net

Book: http://sitepoint.com/books/phppro

Today's Outline

Software Development Lifecycle

Databases

Source Control

Documentation

Open Source

Software Lifecycles

Waterfall

Waterfall

Agile

Many different interpretations

Some or all of:iterative

customer involvement

product is always working

done in bursts called "sprints"

spec can change (in a controlled way)

Databases

Databases

Not a dumping ground

Often your application bottleneck

Worth understanding

Tools

phpMyAdminhttp://phpmyadmin.net

Command Linepowerful

well-documented

Normalised Forms

Guidelines for good table design

1st Normal Formno repeating groups (e.g. comma separated lists)

2nd Normal Formdecouples entities and links them by relationship (e.g. customer data separate from order)

3rd Normal Form