Possible best-practice topics to introduce to tutorial readers

[PatrickLouys]

First of all, thanks for the effort you put into this. Looks like a really good tutorial for someone new to the language.

The only thing that worries me a little is what follows. Until you have a followup tutorial, it might be useful to link a few resources that point the readers in the right direction. Otherwise I feel it is rather likely that they will pick up bad habits without knowing so from one of the many bad tutorials out there.

A few topics that come to mind:

• Guard clauses
• OOP
• SOLID
• Front controller
• OWASP Top 10

I did not give the tutorial an indepth read, so the suggestions might not be suited towards your target audience. Proceed with caution :)

[halfer]

Thanks for your thoughts, appreciated.

The Guard Clauses is interesting. I try to use the Clean Code approach of only having one return point, but I do agree your link is more readable (even if I would add mandatory braces). Was there a particular file you felt could benefit from this approach?

As for the other items, I agree they are all good, but for now, I think even mentioning them might add too much complexity for beginners. It is long and complicated enough as it is! :-)

That said, there are two things that might help here:

• I plan to add a 'comment anywhere' system - so interested parties can add this sort of advice where they feel it is appropriate. Beginners who feel overwhelmed can just switch this off!
• More tutorials are theoretically planned, and one of them would be to framework this up. I favour something really lightweight, like Slim.

[halfer]

Having thought a bit more about this, I think a paragraph could be added in the first chapter. Something along the lines of:

There are a number of design decisions that have been made in this code for the sake of simplifying concepts sufficiently for beginners. You might have heard of object orientation, a methodology for organising non-trivial projects. This would be good to use, but it was felt that there was enough to learn without adding this in too. For the same reason, a framework has been avoided, since it would add "magic" that hides how things actually work.

I've talked at some length about eschewing libraries, so perhaps it might fit in there.

[halfer]

The links here would be valuable for a more advanced audience, but as above, I don't think they fit here. Maybe if I do a follow-up tutorial one day. :smile_cat: