Devlog

One of the first books to be published on the topic of Zend Framework was php|architect’s Guide to Programming with Zend Framework (Amazon). If you’re looking for an “in” into ZF then — eh, well, skip this book.

I purchased this book before it was published. I love php|a. I subscribe to their magazine, and I’ve purchased a few of their other books. But this publication is just way below par.

First point: I didn’t much care for the writing style. I’ve heard it described as “light” or “humorous”, but to me it just seemed amateur. It was as if a bunch of articles were taken off a blog and bound together into a book. Just imagine if my blog posts were published (well, my writing sucks, so perhaps not that bad). Add in the numerous obvious spelling/grammatical errors, I couldn’t help but think who the hell was the editor?

Let’s put that aside, though. I don’t really care about how the book is written or if it had some typos. I buy a book to learn about a topic. So it all comes down to did the book deliver? and the answer, in my opinion, is a big no.

The author only covers the bare basics of each topic. After reading each chapter I was filled with questions like “but how does x work” or “how would I change x”. Not until I Google’d for further reading did I totally understand how each part of the MVC components actually worked. For example, in the MVC chapters there’s no mention at all about routing or dispatching, and no mention of plugin hooks.

I’m one of those people who needs to understand the big picture before I can feel comfortable using something. After reading this book, my mind was full of fragmented bits of information that I was having trouble piecing together. The book explained some things fairly well, but others were just glanced over or you were expected to just “accept” that the code did what it was supposed to.

My final thoughts: The book feels very rushed. It is only about 200 pages, not nearly enough to cover ZF. It lacks depth and doesn’t fully explain certain things. The online documentation over at the Zend Framework website is easily 10x better. The title of this book should be Primer to ZF or Overview of ZF.

My Rating: 4/10