I also see lots of people talking about speed. In my mind, having extra
convenience and error handling is far worth the extra load / run time.
Apart from that, there's also this coding rule which I agree with almost
always. Developer time is far more valuable that runtime. If you spend
lots of time working to make your code fast, you spend lots of money
that way when you could just be buying faster hardware. In addition,
faster code tends to be less readable and harder to maintain. For more,
see this URL:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html#id2878666
I'm no programming expert (started with PHP only a year ago) and this book is great for those of us having little or no prior experience on how to create a good design for an application / script. Thanks for the url Justin, this link is definitely worth the bookmark!