Zend Framework in Action

by Rob Allen, Nick Lo, Steven Brown

From rather humble beginnings as the Personal Home Page scripting language, PHP has found its way into almost every server, corporation, and dev shop in the world. On an average day, somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million coders do something in PHP. Even when you use a well-understood language like PHP, building a modern web application requires tools that decrease development time and cost while improving code quality. Frameworks such as Ruby-on-Rails and Django have been getting a lot of attention as a result.

For PHP coders, the Zend Framework offers that same promise without the need to move away from PHP. This powerful collection of components can be used in part or as a whole to speed up the development process. Zend Framework has the backing of Zend Technologies; the driving force behind the PHP programming language in which it is written. The first production release of the Zend Framework became available in July of 2007.

Zend Framework in Action is a comprehensive tutorial that shows how to use the Zend Framework to create web-based applications and web services. This book takes you on an over-the-shoulder tour of the components of the Zend Framework as you build a high quality, real-world web application. This book is organized around the techniques you'll use every day as a web developer "data handling, forms, authentication, and so forth. As you follow the running example, you'll learn to build interactive Ajax-driven features into your application without sacrificing nuts-and-bolts considerations like security and performance.

This book is aimed at the competent PHP developer who wants to master framework-driven web development. Zend Framework in Action goes beyond the docs but still provides quick access to the most common topics encountered in the development of web applications.

Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.

Genres: Programming

425 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2008

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is a very good introduction to the Zend Framework. Through the book, you build an example application that helps you with some of the main functionality provided by the ZF. Since the ZF is flexible in the way you can do things, it's nice to see a whole application laid out. I also like the way they've used the framework and the way they've organized their code.

However, the book itself has quite a few problems. A couple chapters seem out of order - for example, a chapter on Ajax comes before the DB management and Form chapters, but it uses ideas from both. The code in the book is terrible as well. It is full of typos and references to files that don't exist or haven't been created yet. It is basically impossible to code the application by following the examples in the book. You need to download the source code and follow it.

[Randell Benavidez · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read other resources from the web that discusses topics presented in this book that incorporates better Zend Framework coding practices, some of which are even written by the book's author himself.

The contents are also somewhat outdated as of July 2011. Since the release of this book, strides have been made with the use of Zend_Application (major difference in bootstrapping), support for PHP 5.3, ControllerTestCase, and Zend_Cloud.

[Aprian Diaz Novandi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very essential guide to those who want to learn Zend Framework and develop PHP web application using Zend Framework. This book are easy to be understood by newbie and advanced PHP developer. The required skill is just understanding the basic of PHP programming.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

The documentation on Zend's site can be lacking. This book fills the gaps.