On the Ibuildings blog Matthias Noback has kicked off a series that wants to help PHP developers reduce the complexity of their applications. In part one he shares some general tips along with code snippets illustrating the change.

PHP is pretty much a freestyle programming language. It's dynamic and quite forgiving towards the programmer. As a PHP developer you therefore need a lot of discipline to get your code right. Over the years I've read many programming books and discussed code style with many fellow developers. I can't remember which rules come from which book or person, but this article (and the following ones) reflect what I see as some of the most helpful rules for delivering better code: code that is future-proof, because it can be read and understood quite well. Fellow developers can reason about it with certainty, quickly spot problems, and easily use it in other parts of a code base.

The rest of the article is broken up into several changes you can make to reduce complex code including:

• Reduce the number of branches in a function body
• Create small logical units
• Using single (variable) types
• Making expressions more readable

He ends this first post in the series with a mention of a few other books to read up on around the subject of "clean" and less complex code.