What are some best practices for beginners to follow when using PHP functions for date manipulation?

When manipulating dates in PHP, beginners should use built-in functions like `strtotime()` and `date()` to easily convert and format dates. It's important to be aware of the date format being used, and to handle timezones correctly to avoid unexpected results. Beginners should also consider using the `DateTime` class for more advanced date manipulation tasks.

// Example of converting a date string to a timestamp using strtotime()
$dateString = '2022-01-01';
$timestamp = strtotime($dateString);
echo date('Y-m-d', $timestamp); // Output: 2022-01-01