Wise Choices in PHP Programming By Jon Caldwell At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

If you have been browsing the web foir quite sometime, then you might have come across cookies which allows your browser to remember passwords and other information that may have anything to do with your actions on a particular website. These can be preferences that would allow the browser or webpage on the browser to determine your habits online allowing it to perform the requested operations faster and easier. A cookie is called a client-based information for it is stored on the client computer (yours when you browse the web) and is taken or stored intact along with all the information it contains for a specified amount of time or till you delete your browsing history and cookies. If you have come across tracking cookies, these are information that defines you to a particular web page which is called upon on your next visit. When creating cookies with your page, there are specific parameters (cookies by the way are created using user-made code in PHP) that must be remembered so as not to fill up the hard disks of your client computers as they visit your website page again and again. The function setcookie is used with the following syntax:

setcookie(var1, var2, time)

The var 1 stands for the name of the cookie you are creating, with the var 2 containing the value of the said cookie and the last parameter is the time which specifies the amount of time it takes for the function to kill (terminate/delete) the cookie. A more defined and elaborate explanation of the function can be found on this page.

There are a lot of programmers who share code and sample applications which you can use for free (provided you clear it up first) but for budding programmers, they’re all there for the taking. Sites like http://websitetips.com, http://Smartwebby.com and many other blogs and help sites allows access to tips from programmers like you making it a pleasant experience altogether. Can’t find a question, post questions to the many forums and you’ll get help from others in no time, you might even get help from the guru’s themselves who made the phenomenon that is PHP possible for all of us to use.

Thanks to the basic foundation on which PHP is founded on, the language being free of all legalities and other stuff that makes deployment of other languages on the many platforms quite expensive. But the many people who makeup the PHP community are not ones who keep knowledge to themselves for there are tons of free pre-made templates for applications and processes on the web available for programmers from all skill levels. They make it fun and easy to learn the language in no time and the community fosters growth to all of those who benefit from the use of PHP. Search online for help and you will surely get it in the form of forums and other helpful articles.

As stated in the previous entry, shortening or simplifying your source code makes it easier and better when you need to find bugs and a good example of this would be :

Example :
if ($Mickey == true) echo ‘Welcome to the Mickey Mouse Club House’;
elseif ($MainCharacter == false) echo ‘Hi Barney!’;

Making things a bit simpler, say by taking away the ‘==’ and ‘!=’ gives you;

if ($Mickey) echo ‘Welcome to the Mickey Mouse Club House.’;
elseif (!$MainCharacter) echo ‘Hi Barney!’;

Simplifying code should be the aim of each and every programmer (who’s head aches when you get some bugs you got to fix) so you get to code less and better than the other guy. Remember, we’re all on the same plane using the same free language so we should be helping others for the better.

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