Federico Cargnelutti

Zend Framework is one of the most popular and hottest open-source frameworks being used today. The number of books about Web development using Zend Framework has increased over the last couple of years.

Packt Publishing sent me a copy of the book Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development by Keith Pope to review. I found this book to be a good introduction to the topics that a Zend Framework developer will need to know when developing enterprise Web applications. The book is also aimed at advanced users, considering there were a couple of things that I learned about this framework from reading the book. The book not only shows you how the Zend Framework works, but also how to write an application for real-world usage. The book covers access control, performance optimization, testing, debugging and application design. The writing is clear, the code examples are good and Keith does an excellent job of walking you through the life-cycle of a request, explaining how things work and how you can extend the framework to fit your needs.

Here’s an example of the Storefront application:
http://code.google.com/p/zendframeworkstorefront/source/browse

Conclusion

The book is very well-written, nicely structured and full of highly practical advice. Overall, I’m happy to say that Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development fulfilled my expectations.

Other Reviews

Raphael Stolt

“The content of the book is delivered in a fluent, very enthusiastic and ‘knowledge-pillowed’ writing tone. By implementing or working through the Storefront application seasoned web developers using older versions of the Framework will get a good blue sheet on new components like Zend_Application and it’s implication in the bootstrapping process; while new developers tending towards picking up the Zend Framework will get a current and well compiled guide, which might first start off with a steep learning-curve but will turn into profund knowledge once hanging in there.”

Fred Wu

“The flow of this book is heavily inspired by the famous Ruby on Rails book, Agile Web Development with Rails, where the author invites you to join the process of building a demo application, which in both cases is a shopping cart system. Judging by the feedback of the Rails book, most people feel quite comfortable learning a framework this way, some don’t. I guess if you are not a fan of following a defined learning structure, this book probably isn’t for you.”