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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

This is why:

http://www.google.com/search?q=php+mysql

Searching for PHP and MySQL yields tons of tutorials, code examples, and documentation related to the now-deprecated mysql interface. When I wrote my first comprehensive PHP application last year I spent half a day trying to determine best practices before finally settling on PDO. Newbies won't go through that effort, and will naively land on mysql rather than PDO or mysqli as likely as not.

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Actually, I agree with you and I think this is often missed as one of the main contributing factors to PHPs bad rep. If I had enough spare time (and a wider personal network of php pros to draw from) I'd love to make something like www.betterphp.org with short tutorials and guides teaching newbies the current best practices. As it is, anyone picking up PHP for the first time is confronted with a minefield of conflicting and out of date information, some of which is dangerous.

PHP has been around forever and Google has a long memory. Unfortunately, for every good blog post/tutorial on PHP development there are 100 or more bad or out of date ones.

There's a lot of tutorials, and that makes PHP bad? Sure the tutorials don't teach what you prefer. This just seems like a silly argument.

It's not a matter of preference: it's a matter of secure or insecure. The mysql extension for PHP doesn't support prepared statements and as such is inherently less secure than any other mechanism for working with MySQL (The mysqli extension and PDO being the two alternatives for PHP). But losvedir's point is that the number of tutorials that use the mysql extension's API far outweighs the number of tutorials that use PDO or mysqli, and that those tutorials are often very poor quality (ie: contain SQLI).

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