what do you wish you knew then now?

Hi, I'm still learning PHP. Against suggestions from most of this list I took the Brain Bench test and got in the Master category :) but even at RHIC I scored in the expert range on their test. It must be the similarity to Perl. Anyhow, I was wondering (and I've asked this in a different way before) if some people with "experience" might suggest certain functions or classes etc. that you only encountered after perhaps writing it yourself. This happens a lot in Perl. Many Perl programmers will write a template system only to stumble upon the vast repository at CPAN afterwards. So I always tell new Perl programmers to search CPAN first. Allow me to show my ignorance. I use the following site to find stuff before writing myself: http://www.phpclasses.org/ But I'm not using Pear for anything and never even look wherever it might be. I hope this is not like a Perl programming ignoring CPAN. Ah, I have it in my bookmarks here: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/faq.php I think this is the standard to follow for documenting code: http://www.phpdoc.de/ When I installed PHP on my windows box I saw all the things I could do to the ini file. I much prefer to strict environment. I wrote a LOT of code that was not like it should have been. I would guess that if I wanted to follow an accepted coding standard this would be the one: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.php And that's about it. I name files .inc or .cls or I use .php rather arbitrarily I must admit. Only .php files are returned to a client as that was brought up in a recent thread. Any tips or suggestions very much appreciated. PLEASE NOTE. I know that of course I'm free to code however I want. I fully understand that. But having worked on websites where every programmer coded however they wanted ... well, I've become a fan of a standard outside of myself. No point in saying that I can do it however I want, that I know. Peterhttp://www.coremodules.com/ Web Development and Support at Affordable Prices 901-757-8322 peter@schoenster.com