Federico Cargnelutti

Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. | @fedecarg

Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development

with 3 comments

Packt Publishing recently sent me a copy of the book “Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development” to review.

This book is not a reference guide, but an example driven tutorial that takes you through the process of building Model-View-Controller-based web applications. You will learn how to create and develop a simple online store application. It also covers best practices for better and quicker application development.

The book is based on the latest version of the Symfony Framework, and does a great job telling you what you get out of the box and how it works, which is perfect for hitting the ground running. During the development you are introduced to the concepts and features of the MVC framework. However, for those who want to know more about the framework, the book doesn’t explain how things work under the covers. This book is more for beginners who want to get started with Symfony 1.3.

One thing I didn’t like about this book is that it uses Propel instead of Doctrine as the default ORM framework. Apart from that, it does a great job explaining and demonstrating with practical examples how to build a Web application from scratch.

Overall, and considering that some of the topics in this book have already been covered in Practical Symfony 1.3, I rate this book 4 out of 5.

Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development

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Written by Federico

October 13, 2009 at 11:24 am

Posted in Frameworks, PHP

3 Responses

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  1. Hi,
    I am quite surprised about the 3.5/5 rate.
    That book actually suffers from technical mistakes, early release issues

    Moreover it lacks symfony 1.3 functionalities which could be the point for a book called “symfony 1.3″ and is definitely too expensive.

    The one thing I appreciate is how chapters are separated.

    Too bad the book author requests a review to everyone.

    Matt

    October 27, 2009 at 6:50 am

  2. Every audience has a different purpose. Before reviewing a book you have to ask yourself: Who is the intended audience? This book is clearly for beginners who want to get started with Symfony, rather than experts who want to learn how to extend the core of the framework.

    I think you missed the point of the book. The purpose of the author is to build a real-life web application using the latest version of the framework, and not to comment about the new features added to 1.3. Those who want to know more about the changes made to the framework are clearly not beginners. So the question is, did the author achieve his goal? Yes. How well, from 1 to 5?

    Federico

    October 27, 2009 at 2:04 pm

  3. [...] Federico Cargnelutti [...]


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