What potential pitfalls should beginners be aware of when developing web applications with PHP?

Beginners should be aware of common security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and insecure file uploads when developing web applications with PHP. To mitigate these risks, developers should always sanitize user input, use prepared statements for database queries, and validate file uploads to prevent malicious code execution.

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