What steps can be taken to educate PHP beginners about the importance of prioritizing security measures in their code development process?

It is crucial to educate PHP beginners about the importance of prioritizing security measures in their code development process to prevent vulnerabilities and potential breaches. One effective way to do this is by providing resources, tutorials, and examples that highlight common security threats in PHP coding and how to mitigate them through best practices such as input validation, output escaping, and using secure functions and libraries.

// Example of input validation in PHP to prevent SQL injection
$user_input = $_POST['username'];
$clean_input = mysqli_real_escape_string($connection, $user_input);
$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '$clean_input'";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);