In this blog post today, ephemera looks at a few of the common PHP errors those new to the language might encounter and an inerpretation of each.

I'd like to dispell the myth that errors are a bad thing. Errors are not a bad thing. Errors are a good thing! They tell you exactly what to fix, and exactly where to fix it. The only mystery is in actually interpretting the language of the error, which is another skill that beginning coders have yet to master. What does the PHP interpreter really mean when it says "unexpected T_VARIABLE"? What's a T_VARIABLE, anyway?

This document is the first in a series that will attempt to help you decode error messages. This version is aimed at very new programmers, working in PHP.

The remainder of the post looks at four of the common errors that might pop up - "unexpected T_VARIABLE", "Maximum execution time exceeded", "Undefined index", and "Syntax error". Under each, she talks about what they mean and how to catch what they're referring to. There's also an example for each to show what the error-causing code might look like.

In this blog post today, ephemera looks at a few of the common PHP errors those new to the language might encounter and an inerpretation of each.

I'd like to dispell the myth that errors are a bad thing. Errors are not a bad thing. Errors are a good thing! They tell you exactly what to fix, and exactly where to fix it. The only mystery is in actually interpretting the language of the error, which is another skill that beginning coders have yet to master. What does the PHP interpreter really mean when it says "unexpected T_VARIABLE"? What's a T_VARIABLE, anyway?

This document is the first in a series that will attempt to help you decode error messages. This version is aimed at very new programmers, working in PHP.

The remainder of the post looks at four of the common errors that might pop up - "unexpected T_VARIABLE", "Maximum execution time exceeded", "Undefined index", and "Syntax error". Under each, she talks about what they mean and how to catch what they're referring to. There's also an example for each to show what the error-causing code might look like.