1) What information needs to be secured? What is the most effective way of doing so? (Before you tell me to google it, I don't trust google sites to give me every thing I need to watch out for. Most of the time it tells me to make sure of this and that in the PHP.ini file, which I don't have access to.)

2) How would CHMOD be used with PHP scripts? Why would you need to CHMOD things to 777?

3) If I were making a PHP program, how would I encrypt the code if it wasn't open source?

4) What is a good book to learn all about MySQL and PHP, as well as PHP security?

5) Would it be better to make pages function like .../index.php / .../lookhere.php or something like .../index.html / index.html?page='lookhere'? How would I accomplish the second one? (I saw something on the matter a while ago, but I can't find it again, and it just said that it was possible.)

6) Date and time... This is just a note for myself to check it out tomorrow.

7) I am going to attempt to make a member system sometime soon, and I would need a lot of help on it. Would anyone mind giving me their contact info for MSN/AIM and helping me out when I need it? Posting every question on here would be too much, and searching for tutorials every second would take way too long, especially for small problems that I can't figure out.

8) What would be a safe place to store include files in? Is there a good CHMOD to make include files?

9) I like to keep all of my variables, functions, and everything like that in a separate include file, named php_ref.php, and include that in all of my pages... Is that good practice, or a bad habit? Is it totally up to me?

10) I have read a few things on this, but I was still wondering; can #9 cause my pages to load slower or open security risks?

11) Instead of regex, wouldn't htmlspecialchars() work better?


Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.