Good day,
First of all Happy New Year and Holidays for everyone. Second, and the reason for writing this e-mail, is that I've grown tiered seeing StackOverflow and similar sites full of PHP questions as well as poorly written tutorials about who to do simple or advanced things in PHP. Don't get me wrong, I love PHP, I'm a ZCE for about 3-4 years now and a PHP programmer for about 7 years but I just go tiered by everyone saying how much PHP sucks. And it's not true for the 99.99% part of it at least (I really miss/want things like: ability to have strong typed variables/parameters/return types, named parameters, function overloading/overriding in (inherited) classes) but that 0.01% is blown to like 99.99% by the new or even 'senior programmers' out there that don't have a clue how to do stuff the proper way. If you really want, I can provide some examples of poorly written tutorials on the web in 2012 as we as some questions that shouldn't be asked in the first place on SO and the likes. It is bad because if you type something in Google and you get a bad tutorial you then think you got the answer when in fact it's a wrong answer and you might use it for a while. The problem is that PHP.net doesn't have, in 2012/2013, a proper tutorial that should take you from the 'echo "Hello World"' to the '$example = new Example(); echo $example->getMessage()' path to the way a query should be done, yes, I've seen tutorials still written with mysql_* instead of mysqli_* or pdo... If you take a look on some other languages, like: http://tour.golang.org/#1 http://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/67ef8sbd.aspx http://perldoc.perl.org/perlintro.html They all provide a bit more that PHP and focus what they can do. Right now, http://php.net/manual/ is no where near as useful as it should be for a language that is among the top 10 used languages on the web/world. So, enough with the rant, what can be done? I, for one, could help out in writing a new tutorial section for the website, give the chance for it. Also, php.net could help out by having a wiki like section for tutorials where people could contribute to it. Have tutorials that talk about how you do 'Hello world.', have tutorials that speak about how you can write things to error_log, use xdebug, get things from DB, put things to DB, promote APC as a must (and many people still don't know that APC is not just opcode cache!!!) have tutorials about rest interfaces or SOAP calls or what not, things that people do every day and need them. Have a section where you talk about various frameworks in PHP, without bias to one, have a section that talks about ORMs, pros and cons, get some love for PHP FIG group and their efforts in standardizing stuff out. Have a section where you can see how you can actually make a server in PHP... Help random Joes like me contribute to this in an easy manner even if it needs an approval process or is community managed by trusted collaborators or is wikipedia like. I'd really love to type a tutorial to guide newbs to DB usage instead of going on stackoverlow and respond to the same question over and over and over again ;) Best regards, Florin ---- Florin Patan
