The Definitive Guide to symfony (Expert's Voice in Open Source) eBook: Fabien Potencier: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

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Developing a new web application should not mean reinventing the wheel. That's why a framework is an essential item in your development toolbox. It helps you respect coding standards; write bulletproof, maintainable code; and focus on business rules rather than waste time on repetitive tasks. This book introduces you to symfony, the leading framework for PHP developers, showing you how to wield its many features to develop web applications faster and more efficiently, even if you only know a bit of PHP.In The Definitive Guide to symfony, you will learn about the Model-View-Controller architecture and the crucial role it plays in making frameworks like symfony possible. The book also covers framework installation and configuration, and shows you how to build pages, deal with templates, manage requests and sessions, and communicate with databases and servers. You will see how symfony can make your life easier by effectively managing form data, enhancing the user experience with Ajax, internationalizing applications for a global audience, and using smart URLs. Authors François Zaninotto and Fabien Potencier put a strong emphasis on the tools that symfony provides for professional environments, showing you how to take advantage of unit tests, scaffolding, plug-ins, the command line, and extensible configuration. And since frameworks often raise performance-related debate, this book will give you many tips and techniques for monitoring and improving your application's performance, from caching to expert configuration tweaks.Always keen to offer practical instruction, the authors include a lot of code examples, expert tips, best practices, and illustrations throughout this book, with the goal of providing a resource that satisfies the educational needs of symfony's rapidly growing user community.

About the Author

FABIEN POTENCIER is a serial entrepreneur. Since he was ten, he
always dreamed of creating and running companies. He started his career
with an engineering degree from the French business school Ecole des Mines
and an MBA in entrepreneurship from HEC Paris. In 1998, right after
graduation, Fabien founded his very first company with a fellow student.
The company was a web agency focused on simplicity and open source
technologies, and was called Sensio. His acute technical knowledge and his
endless curiosity won him the confidence of many big French corporate
companies. While Sensio kept growing (at the time of writing, it has more
than 30 employees), Fabien started other businesses: an indoor go-kart
circuit in Lille, France, an auto spare parts e-commerce shop, and an
autopilot training business riding on the most famous French racetracks.
Fabien is the main developer of the symfony framework and is responsible
for 95% of its code. Today, Fabien spends most of his time as Sensio's CEO
and as the symfony project leader.

FRANÇOIS ZANINOTTO is a consultant and project manager for Internet
application projects. He graduated from the French business school Ecole
des Mines in 1997 with a specialization in computer science. He tried quite
a few jobs before settling on the Internet business: social worker in a
children's facility, manager of a bike rental shop, web project manager for
a tire manufacturer, writer of a travel guide on Germany for the same tire
manufacturer, logistician for Médecins Sans Frontières, and IT architect
for a consumer credit company. He joined the Sensio web agency in 2003, and
since then has managed many Internet and intranet web application projects,
dealing with complex usability issues, agile development methodologies, and
cutting-edge web techniques. When the symfony project started, he took
responsibility for the documentation, and wrote the symfony online book and
tutorials.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

For webdevelopers 16 Feb 2007

By Jorge Laranjo

Format:Paperback

If you're serious on developing web applications using a PHP Framework (MVC style) then you need to use the symfony framework. And if you do then you'll need this book. It's a very good introduction to this framework. The book is full of code examples, so it's a good place to search for tricks.

This book it's permanently on my desktop...

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

Exactly what the title says 1 July 2007

By Mark V. Meany

I must start by saying that anyone buying this book is doing so because they have already referenced the online version available from the Symfony web site. There is nothing new in the book, it is a print of the online version and as stated in a previous review a title that will adorn a place on your desk while you familiarise yourself with Symfony.

So it gets 5* because I knew _exactly_ what I was buying when I bought it. Covers most of the bases I needed as a newcomer to Symfony.

If I had to be critical I would say that the book could do with a front-to-cover example that pulled everything together. As it stands it is a reference manual and not a learn by example kind of book. However the Symfony web site has a perfect tutorial (Askeet) that does just this and the book is an excellent reference while working through it.

I would also like to point out that Symfony is a comprehensive framework. There is a learning curve and having a printed book to browse through helps. I spend much of my professional life working with Java frameworks and find the same true there. This book (plus the online tutorial) is as good as any I have read in the Java realm.

If you are still not convinced, take a look at the online version. After you have switched windows a hundred times because you keep referencing it I am sure you will agree that a printed copy that you can annotate is worth every penny.

Nice book but badly out of date 22 Feb 2010

By Jonathan Smith

As an experienced PHP web developer I wanted to learn Symfony quickly and completely. This book is well written and contains lots of expert information, but is now three years old and in need of an update. For example, the book recommends installing with PEAR, but the symfony website now recommends using SVN, and some of the commands specified in the book (for version 1.0) don't work with the current version, 1.4. This made it too frustrating to work with the book, so I used the free online tutorials instead. The book might still be a nice reference to have, but as a tool for learning Symfony, it didn't deliver.

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