What are some pitfalls to avoid when starting to learn PHP, based on personal experiences shared in the forum thread?

One common pitfall to avoid when starting to learn PHP is not properly sanitizing user input, which can leave your application vulnerable to security risks such as SQL injection attacks. To solve this issue, always use prepared statements or parameterized queries when interacting with a database to prevent malicious input from being executed as SQL code. 

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

Keywords

syntax errors undefined variables SQL injection XSS attacks outdated tutorials

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