Irate

Do you even get his point? Ajax is frankly said easiest to use with a framework... The developers do not have to make their work harder than it is when they can easily use premade stuff. So, assume this, because I use phpMyAdmin and don't hardcode all tables myself, that makes me a framework soldier? 'k.

I don't like code completion either (unless it's in my console, there it's handy if you only need snippets to test one-liners), simple syntax highlighting is all a proper editor needs imo.

If I may recommend you some German books on this topic, I would like to mention 'PHP 5.4 & MySQL 5.5 - Das umfassende Handbuch' by Stefan Reimers and Gunnar Thies (excellent literature for every German-speaking newcomer to PHP which includes high quality code examples), 'PHP 5.3 & MySQL 5.4 - Programmierung, Administration, Praxisprojekte' by Michael Kofler and Bernd Öggl, 'PHP programmieren unter Windows' by Arno Hollosi for all those who want to use IIS and MSSQL, and, last but not least, a book on JavaScript... 'JavaScript: The Definitive Guide' by David Flanagan. All of those helped me a lot when I started to learn programming (and still am).

Notepad++, of course (though the normal Notepad is 'retro' enough and 'hipster').