Should I take this tutorial? This tutorial targets the PHP developer who already understands PHP, but wants towrite more efficient PHP code or to improve the performance of existing PHPapplications. It is not intended as an introduction to PHP -- plenty of other resourcesare available for that. Rather, it assumes that you already have an installation of PHPavailable and are familiar with the basic PHP syntax. In this tutorial, you will learn ways to improve the performance of your PHP code. Thetutorial is in four main parts: • General coding considerations that can be often applied to any language, but areillustrated with specific PHP examples (see Writing efficient code on page 4 ). • Nuances of the PHP language and how you can use them to further improve theefficiency of your PHP code (see Tweaking PHP code on page 12 ). • Improving the performance of your SQL queries since, for larger applications, PHPoften is used in conjunction with a database (see Optimizing database queries on page 17 ). • Making your PHP code run faster and references for further reading