How can PHP beginners effectively handle date formatting and manipulation when interacting with databases?

When working with dates in PHP and databases, beginners can effectively handle date formatting and manipulation by using PHP's date and strtotime functions to convert dates between different formats and perform calculations. It's important to ensure that dates are stored and retrieved from the database in a consistent format, such as YYYY-MM-DD. Additionally, beginners should familiarize themselves with SQL date functions for performing date manipulation directly in database queries.

// Example of formatting a date for database insertion
$date = "2022-10-15";
$formatted_date = date("Y-m-d", strtotime($date));

// Example of retrieving and manipulating dates from the database
$query = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE DATE(date_column) = CURDATE()";
// Perform query and handle results