Book Review of "Zend Framework 2 Cookbook"

First off, a pop quiz: what does "Lord of the Rings", "Star Wars", "Godfather", "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "Toy Story" and Jason Bourne have in common? If you answered these were examples of a trilogy in cinema or literature in one way or another, you have my congratulations.

Speaking of trilogies, this article is my third book review for Packt. We were given the opportunity to review the "Zend Framework 2 Cookbook" by Josephus Callaars, of which we will refer to as ZF2 Cookbook.

Highlights of the ZF2 Cookbook include in-depth discussion of and chock-full of code on internationalization, mail handling using PHP, forms, validators and view helpers, in-depth discussion of views and related design patterns, more extensive exploration of databases using PDO (not just MySQL), modules, models and services, authentication, exception handling, dependency injection, performance optimization and bug management; quite a hefty lot for a 340 page cookbook.

Add to the mix the previous books I reviewed- the "Mobile First Bootstrap" and "Zend Framework 2 Application Development", get all three and you'll be in web development ecstasy.

Zend Framework 2 Application Development: A Book Review

I once tried using the Zend Framework 2 documentation as a guide to PHP5 development but the documentation given the number of framework components is also gargantuan, and having to look through the documentation can be intimidating if not cumbersome, especially for newcomers to PHP5 development.

I highly recommend this book to be a reference on ZF2 for newcomers and experts alike within reach on your desktop, literally and metaphorically

With due credit to Punit Shetty through Facebook, I was floored to have had the opportunity to review the book, or rather the eBook version of "Zend Framework 2 Application Development" by Christopher Valles that was released around the last quarter of 2013. At the outset, the book was intended for newcomers to PHP5 development using Zend Framework 2, arousing the curiosity whether this book would be suitable for newbies while at the same time hopefully valuable also to experienced developers.