Awesome how I can't see the site in IE because the author doesn't like the browser.

Great way to get people to read your blog. Not to mention the horrid UI even when I fire up the fox...

I agree. The UI is terrible. It was pure luck that I tried the arrow keys to navigate. And just blocking IE users like that is pure arrogance.

> Exceptions leak a little bit of memory when thrown

So their suggestion for dealing with a limitation of the language implementation, is to not use a feature? Great.

Also, teaching people to do ridiculous sub-optimisations, like using ++$i instead of $i++ isn't really what I think of as best practice. Or telling people to avoid OO because it's slow. Now I know, where those poor newbies get this stuff from ...

Apparently a working UI isn't considered best practice...

Probably much easier to write secure, fast, elegant code when it doesn't need to do anything or interact with users...

The dos and don'ts of UI design should be their first project. :)

And there are several don'ts in the slides too. Never give variables the same name as functions or other parts of the language.

They named their variables $int, $string and $bool...

In PHP it hardly matters, since variables have their own namespace. PHP is a lisp2.

It might matter to the human reading the code.

Well, sure, but that cuts both ways. :) It's convenient to have names like $bool and $int for didactic purposes, at least.

The third example on the type safety slides bugs me (using the type safe comparison operator to prevent both a boolean true and non-zero int evaluating the same.) I would prefer use of a consistent return type from the function to begin with. I guess since some built in php functions behave this way, it's important to know/use...but I don't think I would recommend writing a function such that the type safe equal check is necessary.

Interesting stuff from the slides:

  Use commas with 'echo' instead of dot concatenation
  Where possible use ++$i instead of $i++
  Use the class of ctype functions to check strings

Lots of slides here: http://talks.php.net/

Unfortunately, the slide navigation seems to be missing. Can only navigate slides by including the slide number in the URL eg. http://talks.php.net/show/php-best-practices/19 for slide 19.

Right and left arrows on my keyboard worked for me :]

oops.. thanks! :)