Zend Framework, A Beginner's Guide [Paperback]

This review comes from an experienced PHP programmer (10+ years) who knows OOP, and has worked with other PHP frameworks like Symfony. I bought it to see what the Zend Framework was all about. After reading this book (and realizing I hadn't learned much) I took two courses from Zend that really cleared things up. Yes, I know the courses are much more expensive than this book, and don't pretend a book to compete with that.

A good analogy to explain what this book does is: it gives you the cooked fish instead of teaching you how to fish.

For example, right on page 33 it shows you how to use modules which is definitely not needed for beginners or even required to do a successful ZF project. Here's a quote from Matthew O'Phinney (Zend Framework's main contributor as of 18/Sept/2010) "modules are really second-class citizens in ZF currently." ([...]).

It also jumps to forms use right in page 47 without covering very basic things like how to get a Bootstrap instance from a Controller Action (which is used in real life WAY more than modules or forms), or how to work with Application Resources in the Bootstrap. I'm not saying "don't go into forms at all", I'm just saying that covering it on page 47 is jumping the gun a little. Note that if you are -as the title states- a ZF "beginner", by the point where forms are presented you STILL don't have the tools to do anything on your own, other than the little things the book has shown you. And again, the book shows you how to do a couple things, but doesn't go into WHY you want to do that.

By page 100 it starts with the Model and instead of using ZF's own database components, the author decides to use the Doctrine ORM which is way waaaaay more complicated than using Zend_Db. Again, Doctrine is a wonderful package and I use it ofter because of its amazing features, but it is not for the faint of heart, and definitely not for a ZF beginner. Actually for the project this book proposes there is absolutely no need to use Doctrine; you could do all you need by using Zend_Db and its related classes. None of the features that you'd normaly use Doctrine for are used here. So again, this book jumps the gun once more.

The good thing about this book are the links at the end of each chapter. They point to VERY useful references that expand on what the chapter covered. There are also "ASK THE EXPERT" boxes with some useful info too.

I wouldn't recommend this book to a beginner rather than an intermediate ZF user who wants to see a different take on a ZF project (like for example how to use doctrine on your models).

I had a lot of programming experience in C, Fortran, etc, but zero web programming experience when I bought this book along with a number of others on html, css, php, mysql, javascript, ajax, and another on Zend Framework. Out of them all, I found myself spending about 80% of my time with this book. I think the reason was that it acted as a roadmap for what I needed to learn about next to understand how to build a real-life non-trivial web 2.0 application. It doesn't go into a huge amount of detail on any one aspect. Instead it presents a series of real-life problems to solve in the context of implementing a very well-chosen sample application.

It explores one or two ways to solve each problem making best use of the Framework. It then settles on a particular way to do it in the sample, usually with very good explanations for why he chooses the solution he does, and provides lots of references to good, current online sources of information about other choices as well as more detail on the one chosen. A lot of other (thicker) books, as well as the Zend Framework Reference Manual, and much of the online information in forums, try to demonstrate how many different ways the author knows how to skin a cat, and go into detail on each one, without ever giving any guidance on how to choose among them. An alternative is overview books that are a lot thinner, but they don't give enough detail to actually build anything significant. This book strikes a happy middle ground with good overview material showing how the big pieces fit together, discussion of alternative solutions with references providing details on them all, and then real code implementing one or two of the choices. There are separate stand-alone code examples that help explain alternatives, but each chapter provides code that contributes to a single application that ties it all together, and that can be downloaded and run. There might have been one or two minor problems that I encountered getting it to run (on XP with XAMPP for Windows 1.7.3 and Zend Framework 1.10.7), but even though I had never seen php code before, it wasn't very hard to get it running.

The book is also very current, and it works to present current best practices. Another review mentioned that choosing to use Doctrine instead of Zend_Db seemed like a bad idea. But I would argue that there are plenty of good references and examples of code using Zend_Db. Doctrine really seems to be gaining traction, and using it within Zend Framework is something someone just starting to use the framework would be better off learning than Zend_Db. You go to a framework to get some leverage on complex problems, and Doctrine gives you so much more leverage than Zend_Db. That choice also serves as a demonstration for how extensible and flexible the framework is, which is important for a new user to understand.

Of the 17 books on various aspects of web programming that I can see from where I'm sitting, this is the only one with noticeable wear.

I have almost every other Zend book available on Amazon.com and this one is possibly the best. I dont know what the bad reviews are all about. Yes some of this info is in the docs but in my opinion it is worth the money and it has brought me up to speed pretty quickly. I like it.

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