Beginner terms
PDO Error Handling PHP 5.1+
PDO has three error modes — silent, warning, and exception — controlling how database errors surface.
1mo ago
php beginner
PDO Fetch Modes PHP 5.1+
Constants controlling how PDO returns rows — as arrays, objects, or custom classes.
1mo ago
php beginner
PDO lastInsertId() PHP 5.1+
Returns the auto-increment ID generated by the most recent INSERT statement.
1mo ago
php beginner
PDO Named Placeholders PHP 5.1+
Named parameters (:name) in prepared statements — more readable than positional ? placeholders for queries with multiple parameters.
1mo ago
php beginner
PDO query() vs prepare() PHP 5.1+
PDO query() executes raw SQL immediately — prepare() parameterises it. query() must never include user-controlled values.
CWE-89 OWASP A3:2021
1mo ago
php beginner
9.8
PDOStatement::rowCount() PHP 5.1+
Returns the number of rows affected by the last DELETE, INSERT, or UPDATE — unreliable for SELECT.
1mo ago
php beginner
prefers-reduced-motion — Accessible Animations
A CSS media query and JavaScript API that detects when a user has requested reduced motion in their OS settings, allowing you to disable or simplify animations that can trigger vestibular disorders.
1mo ago
accessibility beginner
P50/P95/P99 Latency Percentiles
Latency percentiles (P50, P95, P99) tell you what most users experience — P99 means '99% of requests are faster than this', revealing the worst experiences that averages hide.
2mo ago
observability beginner
Page Visibility API HTML5
The Page Visibility API tells you when a tab is hidden or visible — use it to pause animations, polls, and video when the user switches tabs.
2mo ago
javascript beginner
password_hash() — Native Bcrypt (PHP 5.5) PHP 5.5+
PHP 5.5 added password_hash() and password_verify() — the only correct way to hash and verify passwords. Never use MD5, SHA1, or unsalted hashes.
2mo ago
php beginner
PHP 3 — Birth of the Language (Rasmus Lerdorf) PHP 3.0+
PHP 3 (1997) was the first version called 'PHP' — a complete rewrite by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans that transformed Rasmus Lerdorf's Personal Home Page tools into a proper language.
2mo ago
php beginner
PHP 4 — Zend Engine 1, Classes Without OOP PHP 4.0+
PHP 4 (2000) introduced the Zend Engine 1.0 — dramatically improving performance and adding basic classes, though objects were passed by value and OOP was rudimentary.
2mo ago
php beginner
PHP 6 — The Version That Never Shipped
PHP 6 was a major development effort (2005–2010) that aimed to bring native Unicode support to PHP but was abandoned due to complexity and performance problems — its features were later cherry-picked into PHP 5.3 and 5.4.
2mo ago
php beginner
PHP 8.5 — What's Coming PHP 8.5+
PHP 8.5 is in active development (expected late 2025). Confirmed additions include pipe operator |>, first-class callable improvements, and several standard library additions. The release follows PHP's annual November release cycle.
2mo ago
php beginner
PHP CSV Handling (fgetcsv / str_getcsv) PHP 5.3+
PHP provides fgetcsv() for reading CSV line-by-line from a file handle and str_getcsv() for parsing a CSV string — both handle quoted fields, embedded commas, and escaped characters correctly where explode() does not.
2mo ago
php beginner
PHP Mail & SMTP PHP 4.0+
Sending email from PHP using mail(), SMTP libraries like PHPMailer or Symfony Mailer, or transactional email APIs — with critical configuration for deliverability, security, and reliability.
2mo ago
php beginner
PHP Sessions PHP 4.0+
Server-side state storage identified by a cookie-based session ID — PHP's built-in mechanism for persisting data across HTTP requests, with security implications for how the session is started, stored, and terminated.
2mo ago
php beginner
PHP/FI — The Origin Story (1994–1997)
PHP began in 1994 as Personal Home Page Tools — a set of Perl scripts Rasmus Lerdorf wrote to track visits to his online résumé. By 1995 it was rewritten in C, and PHP/FI (Forms Interpreter) 2.0 shipped in 1997 as the first publicly released version.
2mo ago
php beginner
Pub/Sub Pattern
Pub/Sub (Publish-Subscribe) decouples senders from receivers — publishers emit events to topics, all interested subscribers receive them without knowing each other.
2mo ago
messaging beginner
Parse Errors & Syntax Debugging PHP 5.0+
A ParseError (E_PARSE) means PHP cannot tokenise your file — the script never runs. Common causes: missing semicolons, unclosed brackets, and typos.
2mo ago
php beginner