How can beginners effectively utilize PHP documentation to learn about date manipulation functions and best practices?

Beginners can effectively utilize PHP documentation by first familiarizing themselves with the date manipulation functions available in PHP, such as date(), strtotime(), and DateTime. They can then refer to the official PHP documentation for detailed explanations, examples, and best practices on how to use these functions for date manipulation tasks.

// Example of using date() function to format a date
$date = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');
echo $date;