Practical CakePHP Projects (Practical Projects) (Paperback)

~ (Author), John Omokore (Author), Richard Miller (Author)
Key Phrases: web services, The Cake Control Panel, Application Structure

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

If you’ve been using PHP for sometime now and would like to start using a web framework, you’ll want to try CakePHP, which is an open source rapid development web framework built on PHP.

PHP experts Kai Chan and John Omokore guide you through a variety of practical CakePHP applications. You will work on projects such as a video gallery, unit testing application, an e–commerce app, a blog site, and much more. Practical CakePHP Projects covers the key architectural concepts as well as including mini projects that you can use to enhance your own applications.

• A friendly introduction for any web programmer looking to choose a PHP framework
• Real–world projects based on current and future trends
• Practical CakePHP techniques that you can use right away

What you’ll learn

• Painlessly create a secure and dynamic web site with CakePHP and MySQL.
• Discover how CakePHP can be used in high–level and demanding applications using CakePHP built–in components as well as methods such as Smarty, caching, and unit testing.
• See how CakePHP integrates with technologies such as Ajax and web services.
• Integrate your own components into CakePHP’s framework.
• Apply CakePHP to mainstream technologies such as Google Video, blogging, mashups, and e–commerce.
• Work through the few pitfalls of some of the CakePHP framework, for example, Access Control Lists.

Who is this book for?

Aimed primarily at CakePHP novices to professionals and PHP programmers seeking to build web applications easily using CakePHP and related web technologies, this book will also appeal to programmers using other frameworks in other languages, for example, Ruby on Rails and Java Spring.

About the Apress Practical Series

The Practical series from Apress is your best choice for getting the job done, period. From professional to expert, this series lets you apply project–motivated templates (or frameworks) step by step in a very direct, practical, and efficient manner toward current real–world projects that may be sitting on your desk. So whatever your career goal, Apress can be your trusted guide to take you where you want to go on your IT career empowerment path.

About the Author

Kai Chan started his programming career in 1992 after graduating from Cardiff University. In 1995, he wrote his first web site, which allowed clients in London and New York to view and discuss the same videos online. Since then, he has worked with many different web technologies. Nowadays, he focuses mainly on the many PHP frameworks available on the Web. Kai holds a computer science degree and a master’s degree in computer graphics. He currently works as an independent consultant. At present, he is improving his own framework, Azzian, and occasionally runs PHP and MySQL courses. Kai is getting married to his long–term partner, Rita, in August 2008, and has plans to get a pet dog after that.

John Omokore has been a web programmer, consultant, and trainer for more than a decade. He is based in London, England. His technical areas include Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and related technologies and web site deployment. Over the last 8 years, he has worked on over 50 web sites and online applications. John holds a bachelor’s of science degree in mathematics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and is pursuing his master’s degree in software engineering at University of Oxford. He currently works as an independent consultant. John is married to a beautiful woman by the name of Christine, and has two daughters, Diana and Daniella.

Richard K. Miller graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in Business Management, but has been interested in technology since he began computer programming at age 10. His experience includes web programming, Internet marketing, and new media strategies. He is the developer of several MediaWiki extensions and WordPress plugins, including the widely used What Would Seth Godin Do plugin.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (December 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 143021578X
• ISBN-13: 978-1430215783
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #216,996 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible Examples, Poorly Written Book..., December 16, 2008

By	Aniq N. Rahman (Mountain View, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It would be acceptable if this book taught you how to do practical projects well, but unfortunately, it cuts corners and teaches you little. You're far better off learning from the gurus in IRC and reading the blog tutorials online.

The ecommerce chapter gives a very simple integration of Google Checkout and Paypal which is prone to security vulnerability using simple apps like Firebug (not optimal at all!). The last chapter creates a very easily hackable CAPTCHA using ASCII art and totally violates the DRY concept.

There is even a chapter on creating a blog (which is less in depth than the CakePHP blog tutorial on CakePHP.org)...

A lot of the code samples in this book are also poorly written -- some controllers that are like 150 lines should really be 30 when written out properly. For anyone wanting to learn Cake, I'd recommend David Golding's book for a firm grasp that goes in depth but also teaches you concepts and methodologies. TERRIBLE book!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good for newer users, January 30, 2009

By	John D. Anderson - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Practical CakePHP Projects is published by Apress, intended for for developers familiar with PHP, and at least marginally familiar with CakePHP as well. The book starts with some introductory material, then moves on to twelve chapters of practical project implementation. If you're not familiar with CakePHP, it's a rapid application framework for PHP. It cuts out a large swath of redundant tasks needed in everyday web development. It's a mature framework with a fantastic community I'd recommend you check out.

Honestly, the first impression of the book isn't great (stick with me though, it gets much better). First, as a member of the core CakePHP team, it's always a bit disappointing to see a book coming from people I'm not familiar with. I'd suggest prospective authors get their feet wet contributing to the community in a significant way before moving straight on to commercial publishing. The lack of community interaction shows in the first chapter-it's essentially a rehash of material that is better found in CakePHP's official online documentation. It's going to be more up to date, and there's really no reason to have it in the book.

You'll probably want to skip right to chapter 2, where the title of the book comes into play - actual projects created in CakePHP. In general, the specific project chapters are technically accurate and easy to follow. Newcomers to the CakePHP field will enjoy the examples and code they can pick through to better see the big picture.

Having said that, some chapters seem much more relevant than others. For example, leading out with a blog application (which is usually the first example new users are pointed to in the official documentation) seems a bit redundant. They don't cover much new ground there, focusing on vanilla MVC interactions. There's a bit of a diversion into the creation of RSS feeds, but that's more or less covered in the official manual as well.

The following chapter covering a simple e-commerce application is similarly uninteresting. More vanilla MVC, peppered with a bit of Google Checkout and PayPal "integration" at the end, which unfortunately only amounts to rendering some buttons that hand users along to their respective payment engines.

New users may appreciate these chapters, but you'll probably find comparable overviews of Cake's underpinnings in blogs, the CakePHP Bakery, and in the official manual.

The remaining chapters of the book (4-13) is where the book really shines. Project examples are varied, and each idea is inviting and innovative:
A message forum webservice
Google maps for traveling salesmen
A Twitter/Google translator mash-up
Unit Testing (not so much, but stay with me)
An ACL-enabled control panel
Internationalization using behaviors
Custom automagic fields
Custom view tags integrated with plugins
"Dynamic Data Fields" (not that CakePHP specific, but interesting to some)
Captcha (which is more of an example with controller/component callbacks)

My impression of the remaining chapters was positive. The steps are easy to follow and seem well-explained to me. The code inserted onto the printed page gets a big hefty in places (three consecutive pages in chapter 9), but that's to be expected in some instances, I suppose. It's a programming book, after all.

Best practices seem to be evident as well - keeping your models thick and your controllers thin, not repeating code, and following CakePHP convention in order to take advantage of automagic are all present.

Aside from the rehash that is the introduction and first few chapters, the authors seem to avoid that in the rest of the book. Each chapter is atomic enough to pick up on its own (more or less), yet you don't have to be re-introduced to covered topics each time you move on.

Putting my own personal grudge of people publishing before contributing to the core effort aside, I'd recommend the book to users who are getting started with CakePHP. Experienced users have probably seen most of what's here, but new users will enjoy example after example of good CakePHP code in interesting, practical projects.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very frustrating experience, January 21, 2009

By	Cati V. Scharpf - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It has been a very frustrating experience for me, trying to decipher this book (to put it nicely).
I only got to the third chapter of it, but I simply cannot follow anymore.
It is a pain to waste my time trying to discover where the errors are coming from, rather than learning something.
It feels like the authors made a puzzle for the reader. The code is not explained at all, half the time I have no idea what they are talking about and when I finally figure it out, I realize that the links used are all wrong, components used in examples don't exist at all, some methods are all twisted involving 3-4 other methods in other different classes, when everything could have been done in a few lines of code in the same method...
Extremely annoying.
Not "practical" at all.


Valentina Scharpf