Total Noob

[kormie]

I'm new to the forums and the language and just wanted to say hi. PHP will really be the first language I've learned (not counting HTML and CSS) so pretty much everything is new to me. I'm teaching myself with a book and Kevin Skoglund's Lynda.com course, both of which seem to be pretty good resources but then again, I guess I'd have no idea if they weren't.

 

Also, I was reading a post about how something like:

 mysqli_query($connect, $query)
or die('Error Message');

is taught to beginners but using "die" is really not good form. Are there any other major pitfalls or bad habits that commonly come up for beginning PHPers that I should be aware of?