What are some potential pitfalls for beginners learning PHP?
One potential pitfall for beginners learning PHP is not properly sanitizing user input, which can leave the application vulnerable to 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 commands.
// Example of using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
$stmt->execute(['username' => $username]);