I’m almost a cakephp books addict. I believe I bought every available book (well, at least those written in languages i could understand). Luckily, there are not that much to be a problem for my bank account.
This is one of the reasons why I immediately got the ebook raw version. Now, after receiving the final print version, i can say I’m quite happy with the purchase. This is the book I was waiting for. The promise of “Over 60 great recipes for developing, maintaining, and deploying web application” is fulfilled.
Some cakephp books are good, some a little bit less; most are the “learn cakephp from the basics” and “follow me while I develop those simple apps” type – that’s good, but this one is different. Mariano’s book is probably what many where missing – the step beyond the blog tutorial.
It fills the only gap left in cakephp manuals: dig deeper in single topics, from Auth to creating and consuming webservices, from model bindings to validation and behaviours, from datasources to routing, shells, internationalization, testing and core utility classes.
The recipes are organized in chapters, by topic – from the simplest to the most advanced. See this preview for the content index. Each recipe addresses a single problem or task, with a clean example -and is organized in (at least) 3 parts: “getting started” (prerequisites, setup, database dump..), “How to do it” (the actual code and guided steps) and “How it works” (explanation of what happened in phase 2).
It’s useful to better understand the topic, and -probably- as a starting point for your ouwn code. It’s also easy to find answers to the questions that arise after the development of the first real cake apps.
One final note on one of the main strong points of this book: the author, Mariano Iglesias, is a well known cakephp expert and contributor; other big names are among the technical reviewers, like Nick Baker and Mark Story (cakephp lead developer). It seems, they take quality assurance seriously.
pros
- well organized, structured content
- real world problems and common / advanced tasks covered
- clear code, easy to understand examples
- expert author and first class technical reviewers
cons
- not for beginners
- you will probably want more
The book on Packt’s site [paperback and ebook available]
