A new book on Zend Framework 1.8

I’m reading the new book of Keith Pope, “Zend Framework 1.8, web application development” of PackT Publishing and my first impression is very good!

This book introduces the Zend Framework (ZF) using a direct approach to build a real web application in depth, in particular an e-commerce web site (you can download the source code of this application from the PackT web site).
In my opinion this is a very good approach because the main difficulties when you start a new php application using the ZF and in general the MVC paradigm are: how to structure the application, where to write the code, how to build the models, etc.

I guess this is one of the first book about the new version 1.8 of ZF. As you know starting from the version 1.8 the team of ZF has introduced the Zend_Application class to easly manage the configuration and the bootstrap phase of the application using a .ini file. The usage of the Zend_Application is showed in the Chapter 3 of the book.

Especially useful is the part of Model design in the Chapter 4, where the author shows step by step how to build a model and why. For instance the author presents the Model of a Product showing the balance between the Controller and the Model, and the general rules to follow: code reuse, controller readability, maintainability, etc.

I’m glad to the author to have inserted the Chapter 12 about testing the application using PHPUnit. This is a very important part of every software developing life cycle and sometimes in the real life someone forgot to test! Me too, i’m honest

In conclusion I strongly suggest this book if you are interested in developing php web applications using the Zend Framework, whether you are a newbie or and experienced ZF developer.

For more information about this book you can go to the publisher web site here.