This site is dedicated to PHP programming language and its proper use, with the focus on disproving various delusions and superstitions.
Besides, there are some tutorials, such as
- The most important basic principles of web programming
- PDO tutorial
- PDO examples
- Mysqli examples
- PHP error reporting
- SQL Injection
- Relative and absolute paths, in the file system and on the web server
Despite some sceptical voices, PHP is still extremely powerful yet easy to use and widely popular language. So, instead of fighting PHP, I decided to make it better.
Honestly, there is nothing wrong with PHP itself. Most of the blames are ridicilous and can be solved by a good IDE. The only PHP's real disadvantage is the fact that it can be used by anyone, even not a programmer at all. Surely, it's a huge benefit too. But also a critical fault. As a consequence we have tons of code of terrible quality all around. Just because most of PHP users are not programmers, and never have been. As a matter of fact, most folks who use PHP barely understand the code they write, but just copy and paste , getting it from another unsuspecting fellow (no offence - we all doing that, more or less). And, as it happens to any illiterate folks, numerous delusions and even wild superstitions arise. To fight these and to show the right way is the mission of this site.
Sadly, but sites like Stack Overflow, beside being of great help, also unwillingly help these delusions to spread. The idea of creating my site occurred to me when I started to realize that Stack Overflow is just a terrible place for sharing knowledge.
I wrote a couple rather successful posts on Meta then, disclosing the problem. Of course, with the effect next to a void.
The problem with Stack Overflow is that its declared goals are mutual exclusive to the methods chosen to achieve them. In a way, Stack Overflow is the very reverse of Wikipedia - a real place to accumulate the knowledge:
Imagine Wikipedia with several hundred articles on the New York city. And one that Google links first is a copy-pasted article from Encyclopedia Britannica, 1913, just because of its age. And every other day several kids from the elementary school start a new one. To impress other kids with their contribution.
And it is not an exaggeration. Every single day a dozen new answers diligently written on the topics like variable scope, type casting, basic syntax and the like. I wouldn't say that such a constant flow of repetitive questions is a bad thing by itself: numerous forums lived this way for ages before Stack Overflow. But the problem is that SO declares itself not a forum.
Such a constant flow makes each answer just a drop in the ocean that hardly gets any attention. There are hundreds of really great contributions that are just buried under the thousands other questions.
From the above one could tell that Stack Overflow completely failed with declared goals, but this page is not about SO. It's just an explanation, why I felt I need a place where I can have a set of constantly improved articles, whose I can just link in the comments, instead of engaging in long discussions with newbie participants.
I also compiled a short list of answering rules, which I believe, could make Stack OVerflow a batter place, How to answer programming questions online
Disclaimer: I am not a native English speaker and have never even attended to an English class, so there are tons of mistakes in the text for sure - I beg your pardon for them. Please, feel free to leave comments with corrections.