A while ago Treehouse got in touch with me, and asked me if I would be interested in working with them on a video course. They wanted more PHP-related content, and they had heard I knew a thing or two about that.

We talked about a few options, and they were interested in PSRs, things like PHP The Right Way, etc, and we ended up settling on a course called: Standards and Best Practices.

This is the outline:

PHP is a flexible language with a long history. Being such a popular language for so long means there is a lot of code out there. There are many ways to program in PHP, and not all of them are as safe, performant, or maintainable as some of the older educational materials might have you believe.

Having so many options can be daunting to many developers as they grow from beginner to intermediate. Fortunately there are established best practices out there, and this course will help you learn about many of them.

I was pretty excited to do this for a bunch of reasons.

Obviously I like being paid for things, but more than that it was a great opportunity to put modern PHP and “best practices” right in front of PHP developers as they are starting out.

There is so much old guff floating around the Internet about PHP on W3 Schools and the like, that having these resources for people to take on right after they learn the basics is going to hopefully improve the situation in the PHP community from the bottom up.

It’s not just for beginners either. My favorite stage in this course is “Creating Distributable OOP Packages”, which has a video for each of these topics:

Creating Components

PSR-1

PSR-2

Composer Metadata

Semantic Versioning

It shows you how to combine the basic knowledge of Composer and autoloading outlined in previous videos, to actually build your own components It even shows the very basics of unit-testing that component to promote TDD over hacking around trying to get that thing to show in the browser somehow.

Now, I know it’s paid content and that’s a bit of an bummer as a lot of beginners just can’t afford it, but I do have a “50% off for a month” sign-up link here for you to use and share to people.

All I ask is that you don’t take the piss out of me too much for the terrified and partially robotic look on my face. I started off pretty wooden but think I relaxed and got the hang of things as I progressed.

It was truly one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, and I’ve kayaked and hiked all the shit over some scary stuff. It was definitely scarier than the time I was almost arrested for vagrancy in New Mexico, and the time the black bear snuck up on me in Canada was just adrenaline not fear.

Having a camera shoved in my face for a damn week had me totally fried and broken, but I would definitely do it again if they invite me back.