PHP, Hell or Heaven: Documentation
Hell or Heaven?
If you have used PHP before you should already now the answer to this question. It is definitely yes. I have never heard someone saying that the documentation was bad or somehow not good enough. Even people who hate PHP can’t disprove that (of course they could try).
Anyway, why is it so good? I think it’s most important aspect is it’s completeness. If I’m writing C++ and I want to know something about a function or the language in general I go to Google. When I need to know something about PHP I go to (you should know this) php.net. I do this for one simple reason: the PHP documentation contains all the information I need. Even when that is not enough, each page has a lot of user contributed notes to help you even further. I only need Google when I’m searching for a tutorial or more in-depth information about a topic.
PHP Documentation
The PHP documentation itself contains a full list of functions, information about the language itself, security information, etcetera, etcetera.. So in a few words: it contains a lot! 
In comparison to a few other languages: C++ has cplusplus.com and Sun gives information about Java. More than once I concluded that these documentations where not the answer to my problem and I had to search on the web. Of course this doesn’t say that these languages are bad. It just says that developing an application with a language that doesn’t have a good documentation could take much longer.
You should know that I am not saying that PHP is good because it has the best documentation of the world, I am just saying that the good documentation makes PHP a better language to use. I do not know if PHP has the best documentation but it is definitely one of the best. (Another language with a good documentation is Python.) The documentation is something what some other languages lack and maybe should get more attention.
Loading ...(Combining the previous article and this one we could say the score is 1 -1. PHP may have lost the previous one but the documentation surely gets it back into the race!)
Tags: c++, documentation, hell or heaven, java, language, PHP, php.net, programming, python
I agree, PHP documentation is very clear and well-written.
User contributed notes can also sometimes come handy, but you should watch out because some of them contain bad information / practices.
That’s true but sometimes you learn cool things. Today I learned when you output:
\x07
The terminal beeps, how cool is that?
(found here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.system.php)