I read the article too a while back.
It is pretty useful indeed.

I like those tips, but, I also lke readability.

it says watch out for #3 and #4 because it affects readability and I agree.

I do catch flack from other programmers sometimes for using brackets when I don't need to, but
It just makes everything look nicer when I have to come back to it.

glad you posted this though.

I personally would love to have an end all beat all SQL injection object to call on any data. Mine currently isn't that great. Anyone got any good suggestions.

--

Greg

Very nice find....

Interesting. Some good ones. A large number are just syntax quirks, though: some to the detriment of the program.

I'd say #3 is completely wrong, in that it's slower and clunker. Just because the writer's syntax can't get out of the way.

#4 is simply wrong and has lead to more errors than anything else.

I agree with #6, but like #3 and #4, it's still just style. No, #3 is still bad, regardless of style.

8 should be "use a framework when appropriate" . There are many uses for php that don't call for a full framework to be invoked.

Meh. A few of them are good, but some are just wrong and stupid. Plus many of them are at best beginner to intermediate level tips, not advanced. Personally, I wouldn't recommend that list to anybody.

I do like the recommendations for frameworks and memcache, though. Even if you don't actually use a canned framework, I don't think you can call yourself an "advanced" PHP developer if you don't at least have some understanding of what they offer and when it's helpful and appropriate to use them. And Memcached...well, that's pretty much a given for anybody who has to scale. Though from the description, I get the impression that the author doesn't really know much about Memcache himself (for instance, he seems to think it's just for databases).

My biggest problem is that a lot of that list seems to focus on micro-optimizations. For instance, they even said that was the rationale for poitns 3 and 4. To me, part of being an "advanced" programmer is understanding what optimizations are useful and appropriate, and this type of micro-optimization is seldom either one.

Great article. Thanks for sharing!

10 is definitely the dumbest thing i've heard in a LONG time >_> If you need the length would you really setup a bunch of if statements to check it constantly?

I think it meant people were using strlen to see if variables were set instead of isset...

Well, that's what I understood from it anyway...

Yours,
Shane~

Actually no. If you read the link in the article, they're talking about using isset() to determine if a string is at least a certain length. In other words, they're saying that if you want to check if a string is at least 10 characters long, using isset($string[9]) is faster than using strlen($string) >= 10.

Personally, I'll grant them that that's kind of a clever trick, but I don't think it's particularly useful in general. How often do you really check the minimum length of a string that it's going to become a performance bottleneck? It might come in handy in certain very narrow situations, but it's generally much clearer just to use strlen() and nobody's going to notice the extra few milliseconds.

My vote for #11:

11. Don't call/load other classes/files from your models or views. Do it from your controller.

After all, if you've got a situation where your controlling code calls a class function which calls another class or loads another file which calls yet another class or loads yet another file, then you're basically doing procedural programming, aren't you?

Isn't it much easier to follow if the controller calls/loads a class which does its thing, then the controller calls the next class? Isn't that what the controlling code is for: deciding what classes and methods get called and when?

This post has been edited by CTphpnwb: 6 Aug, 2009 - 08:48 AM

I didn't read that part in the article at all, guess I was wrong XD lol

Yours,
Shane~

3 is a bit clunkier. It's not necessarily slower though. If the condition is true more than 50% of the time, it's slower, otherwise it's faster, in terms of program execution. It's perhaps a little less readable. But it highlights another point.


will flag errors in some IDEs (like Netbeans) if $x is not previously declared. As it should - it's a block scoping error which just happens to still work in PHP. The syntax he suggests forces $x to be defined in the scope of the function, and as such I would say there's some merit to it.