I did a little more work on the WREK web pages today. I do believe I'm to the point where I can bat out PHP pages that do a number of DB tasks pretty simply. I'm at the point where I have the hard won knowledge. Here are a few of my nuggest that I've learned, all the hard way.

- At least for Oracle and mysql, use the FetchInto type functions and get your results as associative arrays. There is a runtime hit, but it makes your code much much more readable than cryptic index based functions like "OciResult(, 3)" that force you to count columns in your original SQL statement to see what the hell is going on.

- If you are getting a number of results to present as a table or list, save them off into an array of the arrays from above. This allows you to do your own sorting which might be different from the database's "order by". It also enables cool things like allowing people to sort differently via HTML forms with minimal coding.

- Create one or a set of files you include in standard pages. If you have a utility type function that you find yourself cutting and pasting into another page, don't. Put it in the utility include instead. Otherwise, you'll one day find yourself fixing a bug and then having to grep to find all the files you put that bug in. Past it in the include and remove it from all your PHP pages.

- Use source control, even for your own trivial projects at home and even if you are the only person touching the files. There is nothing like having that history to fall back on, and just being able to avoid having all those "file.old", "file.backup", and crap like that is worth it. I'm on the cusp of installing Subversion to try it out.