Those looking for more strange things in PHP, check out analysis of some weird evaluation order in PHP.
Write your code to be clearly understood, avoid being clever. This is true no matter what the language. Avoid the error suppression operator when ever possible. Sadly there are still a few cases where is can’t be avoided, but those are the exception, not the rule.
One more note on the error suppression operator, I strongly encourage including code comments on why you are using it. Using it without mentioning why, in the code, often means that you need to think longer about avoiding it.