Require, Include, Once, Autoload?

I have seen a few PHP performance tips lately that have me worried. A common tip found, is something along the lines of "Don't use require_once/include_once" and also "Don't use autoload." The implications of following these tips are troublesome to say the least.

Code Stutter

In all my experience as programmer (~9 years) I have contemplated, seen and created a few coding and naming conventions. But there was one kind of convention that always struck me as odd and lately as extremely annoying.

PHP and PDO - Use it!

A lot of novice programmers exploring object orientation get their feet wet by implementing a database abstraction class. It's a good learning assignment, but has no more use in production code ever since PHP introduced PDO.