I’ve just finished going through Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development, a new book by Keith Pope. Published by Packt Publishing this book which somehow manages to cater to the ZF beginner as well as the veteran developers is a must-read for anyone doing Zend Framework development.
First impressions are “this guy sure knows his stuff”.
Subsequent impressions are “how the &^%$ did this guy know all this stuff?”.
The first three chapters are aimed at ZF newbies but even at that I still found a lot of nuggets I had managed to overlook even after working with the Zend Framework for almost 2 years. The first two chapters kick off with a run-through of a Zend Framework application and the ZF architecture while the third chapter introduces an online store app which forms the basis for the rest of the book.
The fourth chapter (which I kept going back to) tackles models in the Zend Framework – arguably the most controversial component (or non-component) in the framework and I really like how the author managed to convince me to see his point of view even though I’ve got really strong views about how my model should be structured. He also does offer alternatives although in the end he still goes the domain-driven route.
The rest of the book walks through building the storefront application but special mention must go to the chapter on authentication and authorization. For the first time I found a reason to take a second look at Zend_Acl – the access control component in ZF. Thanks to the book, I’m actually considering ditching my hand-rolled version for Zend_Acl. In my view, that’s quite an achievement. The book rounds off with chapters on optimization and unit testing – two often-neglected parts of php development.
On the whole I’m rather impressed even though I disagree with some of the author’s ways (like using Ant, for instance) and I wholeheartedly recommend this book.
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The book certainly offers value to the Zend Framework beginner. While I was reading the model section of the book, I had similar feelings like you.
One thing I would like to say is the book is about ZF and not application models. The reader should focus on how ZF components and not too much about the model design of the store front application.
I recently wrote a review of the book – http://techchorus.net/zend-framework-18-web-application-development-book-review
Hi,
Thanks for the review, you can find extensions and updates to the sample code for the book on my google code project:
Storefront Google Code
My aim is to try and keep the storefront’s code as up to date as possible as well as blog all the parts I could not include in the book.
Thx
Keith
This article came at the best possible time. I’m just about to start a larger project and this is a big help to me, thanks!
Being a Newbie, I’m regularly doing research for article content that could actually help me . thanks