Getting the most out of your functions

In Part 3 of this series on developing efficient PHP code in real-world situations, Amol Hatwar discusses how to build the most efficiently functional functions, functions you can use without sacrificing too much performance or manageability. The author focuses on writing reusable functions and covers how to avoid the most common problems associated with this task.

Welcome back. In Part 1 of this series, I discussed some basic PHP design rules and covered how to write secure, simple, platform-independent, speedy code. In Part 2, I opened the world of variables and discussed their usage -- both good and bad practices -- in PHP coding.

In this article you'll see how to use functions in PHP wisely. In every high-level programming language, the programmer can define functions and PHP is no different. The only difference is that you don't have to worry about return types of functions.