A good majority of people seeking open source development services would be insisting on using PHP for development. Being one of the most widely used and popular open source language, PHP helps developers build powerful, complex web applications with relative ease. The dynamic open source language can also work particularly well with HTML and a plethora of relational database management systems, and can run on a number of popular web servers.

For those people who are giving PHP development a shot, here are a few tips that could come in handy for becoming good at it. 

• Change your style by going OOP: As a PHP developer, if you haven’t gone OOP yet, you would fall behind the rest in no time. OOP uses classes or Objects to reduce code repetition and makes it much easier to perform basic production tasks. With OOP, classes can be wrapped to perform a bunch of functions that can used multiple times without rewriting. OOP is also easier to debug and requires less coding and server resources. 
  
• Always keep Error Reporting On: Every time you start a new project, remind yourself to turn error reporting to E_ALL. You can turn it off before going to production mode. This way, you will be able to identify the smaller, less noticed errors that can grow into something nasty once you enter production mode. It’s also rather pleasing to see the project run in full production mode without errors. 
  
• Use built-in functions liberally: Suppose you want to take a count of the keys in an array. Looping through the array and incrementing a value for every iteration is one way to do it. With PHP, you can just use one of its built-in functions ‘count()’. Understand what each built-in function in PHP can do for easier programming. 
  
• Understand the project: Without understanding the project, you cannot code it. You need to fully understand what the project is supposed to do, and how it needs to do it. You need to know what the users of your project would be expecting from the application. Once you get the whole picture, you will find it easier to build the project. 
  
• You will know what all tools you can utilize to get the project done. In most cases, LAMP stack would be used. The Linux OS and MySQL database complements what PHP is capable of, allowing the developer to get things working the right way without much effort. This is one of those reasons behind the popularity of and demand for LAMP development services. 
  

Conclusion

Spending a lot of time reading tips and guidelines won’t make anyone a good developer. The one true tested method to become good at development is to keep writing code for something you are really interested in. Building what you like with PHP can get you more interested in understanding what PHP is capable of. The demand for PHP developers in the IT software development Dubai sector has not dwindled and won’t be going down any time soon. The language still holds great potential, and still haven’t failed to deliver on its promises.