You know that there are conventions for naming artifacts in a program?
For example, Java has come up with a pretty strong and reliable way of naming classes, methods and attributes.
Wikipedia has this to say about naming convention (not too helpful, but still interesting) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_convention_(programming)
Here is a page from Central Washington University (with Java, but still helpful for other programming languages) : http://www.cwu.edu/~gellenbe/javastyle/naming.html
Other article here : http://drupal.star.bnl.gov/STAR/comp/sofi/soft-n-libs/standards/NamingAdvice
But basically, naming a method usually start with a action, then a noun, etc.
For example:
$obj.addObservers(...); // action, noun
$obj.setPrice(); // action, noun
$obj.getModelFromDb(); // action, noun, preposition, noun
$obj.setActive(...); // action, noun
$obj.isActive(); // yes (true) or no (false) statement
$obj.canEdit(); // yes (true) or no (false) statement
$obj.setCanEdit(); // action, attribute
// etc.
Avoid using negative method naming, ex: $obj.cannotConnect(); which will simply confuse everyone. (This is also true when prompting, ex: "You are about to delete this file, do you want to abort?" ... choosing 'no' thinking you are going to delete a file and it was a mistake will do the opposite...)
Back to method naming;
- your method names should be as short as possible, but avoid using acronyms, unless the method name is too long (this is a judgement call here);
- methods should be self explanatory and self documented;
- avoid using prefixes, unless you are working with non-OOP languages (pretty rare these days). Your prefix should be your class, or namespace, etc.
- each method should have only one function (one purpose) if you method does more than one thing, consider splitting that method into many, and call each of them inside a method (like
doActionBatch(), where 'ActionBatch' is the name of the actual action to perform; Ex: doHttpConnect()
- etc.
A tip I may suggest is to read programs written by the community; they usual adopt best practices in naming conventions and you will get more familiar with "how methods are named"
