Slides from a talk I gave to local students studying PHP, about some key skills, open source, and the importance of learning to help themselves.

1. Good Practice in PHP Or "Things I Wish New Recruits Knew"

3. Twitter: @lornajane

4. PHP consultant, trainer, and author

5. I live in Leeds

6. Website: http://lornajane.net

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

9. Databases

10. Source Control

11. Documentation

12. Open Source

13. Software Lifecycles

14. Waterfall

15. Waterfall

18. customer involvement

19. product is always working

20. done in bursts called "sprints"

21. spec can change (in a controlled way)

22. Databases

24. Often your application bottleneck

25. Worth understanding

27. well-documented

31. Foreign key contstraints

32. Columns used in where clauses

34. Which indexes are used

35. What kind of indexes

36. Number of rows scanned

37. Great for diagnosing slow queries

38. Source Control

40. Check out project

41. Make changes

42. Update to get other changes

43. Commit changes to repo

44. svn log ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r3 | lornajane | 2010-04-25 10:32:09 +0100 (Sun, 25 Apr 2010) | 1 line adding documentation notes ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r2 | lornajane | 2010-04-22 09:07:56 +0100 (Thu, 22 Apr 2010) | 1 line outlining source control and design patterns sections ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r1 | weierophinney | 2010-03-30 17:37:27 +0100 (Tue, 30 Mar 2010) | 1 line Added readme with outline ------------------------------------------------------------------------

45. svn diff Index: README.txt =================================================================== --- README.txt (revision 3) +++ README.txt (revision 4) @@ -31,12 +35,20 @@ to share ideas to raise profile to be told you're doing it wrong! + (pulling up examples off our own blogs, if connection allows) Testing (Matthew) QA tools and CI including code analysis, mess detection, etc (Lorna - QA tools; Matthew - CI) + Static analysis + code sniffer + demo examples, find a suitable small codebase (joindin?) + mess detector + demo examples + what else? + Deployment

48. Trac ( http://trac.edgewall.org/ )

50. TortoiseBzr

51. TortoiseHg

52. Centralised Source Control user repo user user user

54. Always commit to central

55. Can branch centrally

56. Distributed Source Control repo repo repo repo repo

58. Commit to local repo

59. Share changes between anywhere

60. No central point

62. Install subversion

63. Use a hosted solution

64. Documentation

67. inheritance

68. methods

69. parameters

70. PHPDocumentor

72. Comments for additional information

73. Add descriptions to the documentation

74. PHPDocumentor Comments 1 < ?php 2 3 class AttendeeList { 4 private $attendees ; 5 private $observers ; 6 7 /** 8 * Add an attendee to the list 9 * 10 * @param integer $id Attendee identifier/array index 11 * @param string $name Full name of the attendee 12 * @access public 13 * @return boolean If attendee was successfully added 14 */ 15 public function addAttendee ( $id , $name ) { 16 $this -> attendees [ $id ] = $name ; 17 $this -> notify (); 18 } 19 20 }

76. Installation instructions

77. Examples

78. FAQs

79. Forums

80. User-contributed

82. Databases

83. Source Control

84. Documentation

85. Open Source

87. Maintenance and bugs

88. Design patterns

89. Open Source

94. Build excellent (free) tools

96. PHPNW http://phpnw.org.uk

97. GeekUp http://geekup.org

99. Check out http://stackoverflow.com

100. Learn to help yourself!

101. Questions?