An ideal breakdown of all the security issues to consider when coding PHP (and MySQL) and the different types of attack a PHP website can be open to.

These include attacks such as XSS, SQL Injection and Form spoofing.

A further useful and related article can be found here – the author desribes how to sanitise database input before applying it to your MySQL database.

Tune up your PHP skills by regularly reviewing sites like the one highlighted today. At Good PHP Tutorials, you’ll find a list of links to tutorials on a wide range of PHP topics such as using PHP with jQuery, a thumbnail generation script, or being notified when Googlel crawls your site.

There are of course many more. The quality of the tutorials does vary as they are picked from around the web, but really these are an excellent starting point from which to build out your PHP knowledge and experience.

CodeIgniter Is A PHP Framework

• CodeIgniter is easy to use
• CodeIgniter saves time when coding PHP web applications and sites
• You don’t need a brain the size of a small planet to use it
• The forum community is very helpful and very knowledgeable
• You can install it in 3 minutes or less (I would say 1 minute, but I am allowing for those of you that might type very slowly)
• Form validation is no longer an experience only slightly better than toothache, but is truly a joy (as are many other things, but form validation is my favourite)
• CodeIgniter just works without having to fiddle about with DLLs,  rebooting servers, or weird and annoying post-installation system side effects (curable only after you’ve visited 8 different forums and googled for hours for obscure and marvellous solutions), that seem to accompany every other framework I’ve tried.

Try it – you won’t be disappointed. Well you might be disappointed if you are an evangelically purist programmer who is a stickler for coding elegance and strict adherence (punishable only by a slow and agonising death) to lots of esoteric OO rules. If that describes you, you may prefer to hand code the PHP framework yourself!

w3schools covers topics like HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, PHP, ASP and SQL, but you’ll find a lot more there.

This site is a great starting point for learning to build web sites from scratch. W3Schools had over 11 million unique visitors in January this year. That is staggering.

The web site is completely free, and the site owners expect you to help them out by linking to their site from your blog, pointing out any errors you find on the site and so on. Help to keep this valuable resource free. Use it and link to it.

I wish they had an affiliate program as I would promote their products happily. I recently bought the product they call the Browser Book.

The Browser Book costs $50, (I didn’t buy the laminated version which is a bit extra), and it contains a wealth of information.

I am in the UK, and Visibone are located in the US. I ordered the Browser Book on the 8th July and it arrived today – the 16th July.

Anyway – here is a run-down of what the browser book contains:

Web Safe Colours

Colour Card with hex and RGB values for all web safe colours. The image above shows the colour chart with all 216, web safe colours. When you are stuck for a colour scheme this can be a good starting point. Web Safe colours have never looked so appealing.

Fonts

All standard fonts on Windows, Macs and Linux, with examples of how they look and an indication of font sizes

Symbols

Codes for HTML symbols with hex values too. This makes it a simple lookup to figure out how to do characters like these : ♥ and ½ and ∇

XHTML

A full list of XHTML tags with popular attributes – never for example have to scratch you head for all the attributes available on a form tag again. And did you know there is a tag for quote marks. I didn’t.

CSS

Just what I need – a list of stylesheet reminders, (CSS2). This is great as I love to code CSS by hand and now I can just look something up if I’ve forgotten. I can code in Notepad if that is what I want, (rather than have to bring out the predictive HTML editor . . .). There is also a useful HTML ⇒ XHTML migration checklist.

Javascript

Visibone uses Javascript asserts to explain the Javascript syntax. As Bob says “all the code here not only runs, but tests itself”. Somehow manages to introduce you to Javascript functions you don’t know, by using them to explain the ones you wished you knew.  Clever.

The DOM

The Javascript Document Object Model. Really very useful when you are manipulating page content. Which in itself can make you drive you insane, so this helps.

Regular Expressions

Javascript Regular Expressions with lots of usable code, right there on the page. I bought a book once, called Regular Expressions for Dummies. So this is definitely a step up.

MySQL

Next is a MySQL statement summary – very useful for jogging you memory for date functions, and the order of tokens to use when you are wanting to GROUP BY, LIMIT TO and ORDER BY whilst HAVING a headache.

PHP

There is also help with PHP 4 and 5 with a fabulous list of functions including MySQL calls, string functions and even PHP.ini options.

Thanks Bob!