Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

CakePHP is a leading PHP–based web app development framework. When asking a question on forums or chat rooms, many CakePHP beginners get little help from the experts. Simple questions can get a response like, “Well, just read the online manual and API.” Unfortunately, the online manual is depreciated, and who wants to absorb a programming language or framework from an API? Beginning CakePHP will do the following:

Leads you from a basic setup of CakePHP to building a couple applications that will highlight CakePHP’s functionality and capabilities without delving too deeply into the PHP language, but rather what the CakePHP framework can offer the developer.

Teaches you to use CakePHP by incorporating advanced features into your web development projects.

Targets beginners of CakePHP or web frameworks in general as well as experienced developers with limited exposure to CakePHP. A secondary audience may include developers undecided on adopting CakePHP or business managers trying to assess the value of incorporating CakePHP into their toolbox.

What you’ll learn

• Install and configure the CakePHP web framework.
• Create your first CakePHP web application: to–do lists.
• Progress by building a more complex blogging application.
• Incorporate Ajax and Web 2.0 principles and techniques into your blogging and other CakePHP applications.
• Apply these sample applications along with advanced techniques as a framework or template for building your own web applications with CakePHP going forward.

Who is this book for?

This book will speak to an audience of developers already familiar with PHP but who may not be PHP experts. This book is tailored for those new to CakePHP and who want a thorough tutorial.

About the Apress Beginning Series

The Beginning series from Apress is the right choice to get the information you need to land that crucial entry–level job. These books will teach you a standard and important technology from the ground up because they are explicitly designed to take you from “novice to professional.” You’ll start your journey by seeing what you need to know—but without needless theory and filler. You’ll build your skill set by learning how to put together real–world projects step by step. So whether your goal is your next career challenge or a new learning opportunity, the Beginning series from Apress will take you there—it is your trusted guide through unfamiliar territory!

About the Author

A biography is not available for this author.

Product Details

• Paperback: 344 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (July 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430209771
• ISBN-13: 978-1430209775
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #68,051 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well written - falls short, August 30, 2008

By	M. Cordoba "mxc" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The book is overall well written, however the series title is misleading. I could have easily labeled this 3 stars.

PROS:
- Well written. (Few tech authors have this skill)
- Overall good cover of the basics
- Full code is provided, author has a forum where he answers some questions.
- He shows good code practices

CONS:
- This book should be in the series: "From Novice to having some understanding". It does not cover ACL at all, and the cover of the basic Auth component is incredibly basic and lacking. Most of the examples are very simple, so you won't be getting to be a "Professional" with this book. The tile is ok "Beginning CakePHP" but by no means expect this book to cover in depth topics of challenging issues.
- The book is one big project that keeps adding on things - which is good. But the author decided to go for a Blog... Please another application? Pretty please? There are about a million blog tutorials out there, he could have gone the extra mile by giving us an interesting (i.e realistic) project. There is already a good blog tutorial on the cakephp.org site. Yes, the author does take the blog further in this book (he better, it's 300 pages) but still.
- Not the author's fault - but be warned that the book is for RC1 - and believe me, you will struggle figuring out why the provided code is not working and why so many errors (if you are using RC2 or beyond).
- All the examples except 1 are straight out of the box CAKEPHP built in things - which is fine, but real projects usually require you to stretch things, change some models to be used differently.
- The "Advanced features" chapter is a joke. It spends less than 1 page in most of those advance features. Basically, you are on your own. And a whopping of 6 pages on the forms helper. (Web applications live on forms, a whole book could be written on the topic).

I gave it 4 stars for being a clearly written book on CakePHP, but don't expect this book will be more than an introduction, with a few nice gems.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but with some issues, December 10, 2008

By	Penny Gname - See all my reviews

I have mixed feelings... I think if the book was just now published and in sync with the current cake API I'd give it 4-5 stars.

Overall I am liking the book as it does a pretty thorough job of explaining things, unlike tutorials that just show you how to do things, but not explain them. This book explains almost everything.

However, just a bare 6-7 months in print and this book is already sadly obsolete. Many of the code examples don't work any longer as the API for cakePHP has already changed significantly. I have spent more time trying to chase down the fixes/changes than I am making progress in the book and I'm getting frustrated. The author responds to errata eventually, but seems to take awhile. Meanwhile you can post your questions (or search for them) in his Forum or Blog. I've posted to both places but I'm not sure the author is replying to them any longer, fortunately other people are!

I could wish that the author would try to keep the code snippets updated on his blog, forum or in the errata. I think anyone writing a book like this has to understand how quickly the book is going to be out-of-date and make some effort to communicate changes to his audience, otherwise they'll just end up annoyed like me.

So would I recommend this book? Yes, with the caveat that you'll need to dig for fixes constantly and progress might be very slow.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great cakePHP book, November 2, 2008

By	Mostafa farghaly (Egypt) - See all my reviews

The book is very good for beginners , the material is very interesting and the writer is skilled to wrap my mind around every cake aspect and conecpts , the code is not very long and boring , but it's short and illustrate each component of the framework , the main project of the book is Blog , i couldn't believe how easy and fast cakePHP could do it , and now i use cakePHP as my day to day framework for my work , if you are already familiar with cakePHP i recommend Apress:cakePHP practical projects ;)