In what situations should a PHP developer consider discarding outdated or irrelevant reference materials in favor of more up-to-date solutions?

PHP developers should consider discarding outdated or irrelevant reference materials when they are no longer supported by the PHP community, when they contain deprecated functions or features, or when newer and more efficient solutions are available. It is important to stay current with PHP best practices and updates to ensure code quality and security. 

// Example of discarding outdated reference materials in favor of more up-to-date solutions
// Old way of connecting to a MySQL database using mysql_connect (deprecated)
$connection = mysql_connect("localhost", "username", "password");

// New way of connecting to a MySQL database using mysqli or PDO
$pdo = new PDO("mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase", "username", "password");

Keywords

PHP outdated reference materials up-to-date solutions libraries functions

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