Question

What tutorials or guides about features/techniques influenced the way you did something.

Eg a compelling tutorial (located here) about unit testing got you into unit testing. Your code improved dramatically.

Answer 1

I think some of the most important “documentation” that helped me improve some parts of my code / coding are :

• documentations from Frameworks / libraries, and the source code of some of those : they showed me how useful it is to have a well-presented well-structured well-commented well-organized code.
  • About those, I could say the manual and sources of MVC Frameworks tend to show great stuff, sometimes (inheritance, interfaces, design patterns, … things you only hear about at school — or at least it was the case when I was at school ^^ )
• code reviews / peer reviews at work
  • both when my code was under review : advices from more experienced colleagues are always great, when you’re willing to learn
  • and when I am the one reviewing code : you always learn new stuff when reading other’s people code, and being able to discuss about it really is great !
• The community : I read (even if often quite only rapidly) lots of blog-posts, and those are often written by people with lots of experience, who want to share great stuff
  • One nice source of those, for PHP of course, is Planet PHP ; just subscribe to the RSS feed ^^
  • But there are plenty more, not only about PHP !
• Conferences are also a nice way to meet people, discuss with them, and learn from them