What are some common pitfalls for beginners when trying to learn PHP for web development?

One common pitfall for beginners when learning PHP for web development is not properly sanitizing user input, leaving the application vulnerable to security risks such as SQL injection attacks. To solve this, always use prepared statements or parameterized queries when interacting with a database to prevent malicious input from being executed. 

// Example of using prepared statements to sanitize user input
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

syntax errors database connections security vulnerabilities variable scope debugging techniques

Related Questions