10 Tips for Better Coding

Global variables and loops are a mess and can prove problematic when your application grows to millions of lines of code (which most do!). They may influence code elsewhere that is difficult to discern, or cause noisy naming clashes. Think twice before you pollute the global namespace with variables, functions, loops, etc. ALWAYS USE NAMESPACES.

Never use names like $k , $m , and $test for your variables. How do expect to read such code in the future? Good code should be meaningful in terms of variable names, function/method names, and class names. Some good examples of meaningful names are: $request , $dbResult , and $tempFile (depending on your coding style guidelines these may use underscores, camelCase, or PascalCase).

Managing changes and revisions should be easy but effective, so pick whatever version control software that will work best with the workflow of your development team. I prefer using a distributed version control tool like Git or Mercurial; both are free software/open source and very powerful.

Try to use tools like Ant or Phing to get your source prepared, compressed, and deployed. Building your whole application with a single command is a marvelous way to prevent errors and omissions that are inherent when performing repetitive tasks.

For large applications spanning several classes and namespaces, you should have automatically generated API documentation. This is very useful and keeps the development team aware of “what’s what.” And if you work on several projects at the same time, you will find such documentation a blessing since you may forget about structures switching back and forth between projects.

It's easy to overlook writing tests for a simple application, but as they grow in size it becomes increasingly important to be sure a change in one location after a time doesn't break something. Having tests makes sure the specific process you're testing always stays functional as intended.