Customer Reviews

Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in Web Development)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

This book is not an instruction manual on CakePHP. It's really an overview, with a little CakePHP thrown in. It is for an old version of CakePHP, you'll get many errors that you'll have no idea how to solve if you use a current version of CakePHP. It's both wordy on preaching about Cake's pluses and too dense and assumes the reader knows things about Cake you turn to books like this for. It fails at explaining syntax of CakePHP. It fails at giving examples. It fails at all but the most basic, rudimentry tasks. This is more like: "CakePHP: From Novice to 'I kinda get it.'"

The Author explains how things work but neglects to show the reader the proper syntax is some cases, often leaving more advanced configuration answers out of the book. He'll tell you about a parameter but not show a single line of code that explains the syntax needed to activate it. Excerpt: "For more control, you may want to enter more parameters for the "has many" Relationship:" Where to enter those parameters? I have no idea.

Also, this is supposed to be a tutorial book and the author leave us to our own devices to construct relationships in cake when we've never used Cake, saying, "Just follow the association rules" which aren't laid out clearly in the chapter that handles them.

The meat of the book is a bit better, but explains things in reverse order. Instead of giving us an example, and then explaining it, he explains everything then gives us an example.

Routing is another mystery to me still since the author shows you the default routes but then glosses over other routes, expecting you to know the implications of what he's failed to clearly explain.

Also, this book uses one example -- a blog -- the entire book. This would be fine if it weren't for the fact that there's a free CakePHP blog tutorial online. But really this book is simply a tough way to learn CakePHP. Save you money and look elsewhere.

I have been programming with PHP and CakePHP for 2 months. Like many I was informed that I could find everything on the internet that I need to know. Though the information on the internet gives you the code and some detailed explanations on how to build site blog post and catalog sites, it does not do a highly effective job at describing how all of the components of CakePHP work together. I am not talking about the controllers, models and views. Though I am familiar with OPP and have written programs in other languages, as well as developing website with CakePHP for the past two months, I was not grasping how CakePHP SQL code was configured nor was I grasping how all of the components of CakePHP interact for trouble shooting all of the code that was written by someone else, that was not working, without any documentation or comments in complex areas of the code. This book has been a great asset to move my understanding along to where I now can zip through the complicated code written by another, make the necessary adjustments or rewrites to get the code to run smoothly and with less coding.

I recommend this book to anyone who is new to CakePHP. It is a great foundational explanation book and is easy to follow. I have read many programming books in many languages, many leave out so much information, others are too wordy. This book is well balanced in its explanations of how CakePHP works and how to use the system. This book is not a cook book or a book of code examples as it clearly explains in the beginning of the book. If you are looking of code for PHP try PHP Phrases, or Larry Ullman's books on PHP. I have not found a complete reference book on PHP that meets my criteria of a book of books on PHP. Remember this is a book for understanding the nuts and bolts on how CakePHP works and why it is so great it is not a book on PHP coding. This is one of the best books I have read. The explanations are clear and there is sample code sufficient to go with the explanations.

I only wish there was a book with this information and more advanced information in one book.
This book is not large and can easily be read over a week as time permits.

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.

This book is passable, but I wouldn't call it well-written. The author seems to have little appreciation for how this topic comes across when discussed for the first time. Given that CakePHP's naming conventions are hardly conventional, the author REALLY should have spent more time explaining this confusing topic. E.g. name your model in the singular, controller in the plural, the corresponding controller class name must include "Controller" appended to its name, but the file name must append "_controller.php" in lowercase, and somehow the URL comes out being the lowercase plural name of your controller. Did you get all that? Neither did I, because 1) it's insane and 2) not clearly laid out in the text.

Shortcomings of the Book:
The author frequently tosses inadequate definitions of technical items around with the promise that they'll be discussed more in later chapters (e.g. the model's "fields" parameter on pg. 42 -- is it supposed to be an array?). Explain it please, or leave it out altogether. Halfway just confuses me and kills trees. The text would be much easier to follow if it kept to the relevant example at hand and then said "For more info, see page 123".

Many code samples are not labeled as to which file they belong in.

The author uses bad database definitions. In my experience, it's HORRIBLE to name your primary key simply "id". Much much better would be "tablename_id". You can waste hours and hours cleaning up bad database names or deconstructing complex queries, and it's frustrating to see the author give this as an example to the public.

And further more, it's bad form to use PHP short tags -- that's a big no-no if your app has to run on web servers where you can't dictate the PHP settings.

After struggling through this, I'm seriously considering abandoning CakePHP altogether.

I doubt that this is the right book for a novice. This text is a bit dense and difficult to pick through, it probably could have used a more forceful technical editor. Longer could be better, if adding more pages opened up the prose.

An appendix which details methods and properties would be helpful. (I prefer some of the other Apress Novice->Pro titles that layout all of the tools and parts and say "Here's what's in the toolbox, here's the materials, don't worry about knowing how to use them all right away, but know they exist. Now let's build a little something.")

The CakePHP online "Cookbook" is clearer and better organized than this text. And, I'm not sure that this book really expands the Cookbook in a helpful way. I also don't like PHP shorttags or echo "short-circuit syntax" as used in this book. I find them harder to read, and the Apress PHP book by Gilmore advises against using them.

The book is well written but only covers simple topics. Only helpful if you are only planning to write an application consisting only of simple CRUD screens.

When I try to write just 1 screen for real world application, then I need to scroll read the whole book to put things together, and also google for other things not covered in the book. So the organization and content for me falls short.

I think this is not the fault of this book. But I think all book about cakephp in the market is like this. I wish a pragmatic book about cakephp comes out.

I'm trying to build a social app with my team and one of my teammates is an expert in CakePHP so he suggested we use it instead of writing PHP in traditional way. So, I have to start learning it with pretty tight timeframe. I don't like reading from websites coz I usually take a lot of notes and underline things for referring back later.

I got this book and it seems to be pretty good at first. But after a week wrestling with it, I found that it doesnt meet my expectation. I am not at all an expert in MVC framework or OO programming-only knew the concept from school. This book actually confuses me coz the author kinda jump back and forth between stuff, some stuff he just said "write exactly like this and run it" then explains it later line by line, and the explaination usually doesn't provide me a solid ground on how MVC all works together. I finally gave up when I reached the Cuztomizing View chapter (it's not exactly 'Cuztomizing View' either, its more about creating form submission'). Now Im looking at the official tutorials on the websites and found that they're much easier to understand.


Overall, wouldn't recommend this book to a beginner in MVC :(

As intro books go, the author is pretty long-winded upfront (and seems to repeat himself). I wish he would get to some examples faster

Also - with the kindle version, the code snippets were pasted in as image blocks - this means that you can't copy/paste out code when following the examples. Strangely enough, the body text of the book is selectable, just not the code areas. Major Fail

I have read many books on programming over the past few years, and this is one of the worst ones, simply because of the way it is written.

The text manages to be extremely dense and yet, at the same time, does not contain much useful information. Examples are not well explained, major concepts fail to be presented in a clear and concise matter. And certain things, which get explained in great detail still do not make sense.

I am half way through the book, and it has been a grueling experience.