The most important aspect of becoming a PHP expert is navigating through a safe path in a land of a million pitfalls. This means, you should not try to push th

The most important aspect of becoming a PHP expert is navigating through a safe path in a land of a million pitfalls. This means, you should not try to push the language yourself in anyway. Do the most straightforward, traditional things. Use a well tested framework (if you are doing web). Something like Symfony would do. Don't make your own 'deep' abstractions. The language is not strong enough to support them without a million unit tests to go with it. Then you should have awareness of the most prominent of the Php pitfalls. /r/lolphp is a good resource for that. Go through the posts and read anything with more than a dozen upvotes. Then, regarding security and other general topics, don't count on the Php community to answer your questions. I mean, don't take your questions to /r/php but /r/askprogramming or some general forums. Trust only extreamly popular libraries that have in in use for long time. For example, Symfony components. Two things you might want to take a look into is specifically Dependency Injection and the Composer dependency manager and how autoloading classes based on their fully qualified name (\Vendor\Package\Classname)