We sat around the fire on Wednesday night chatting about PHP when Ben Ramsey and I entered an interesting discussion about PHP’s future and how to introduce newbies to PHP.

I’ll define the sterotype which serves as the premise for this discussion. Most books that introduce PHP, even those which rely on previous programming knowledge begin with an example like this:

print "hello world";

This example will be soon followed within the next 1-3 chapters (sometimes after, sometimes before introducing loops, conditions, and other basic language constructs of PHP) by an example like this:

print $_GET['foo'];

In any/all books it’s far later in the book where Object-Oriented programming is covered. In the coverage of creating forms, handling GET/POST/Cookies/Session there’s relatively little talk of security, escaping, or encodings.

The long and short is that people learn PHP in a way that first teaches them to design web applications in a poorly maintainable, insecure, and generally poor method. With the advent frameworks like the Zend Framework and other MVC-based libraries there’s no need to teach bad habits that result in a bad name for PHP.

[tags]php, books, rant[/tags]