Requested to review "Zend Framework 2.0 by Example"

Packt Publishing is often requesting people to perform a technical review of their books. I have done that a while ago for a Zend Framework 1 title and this week I have been asked to do the same for a Zend Framework 2 title: “Zend Framework 2.0 by Example”.

Title page of the book Zend Framework 2.0 by Example

Back then I published a review on Amazon, now I said I’d publish the post on my own blog. The book is shipping as I post this, but I am curious about the book.

Reflecting myself about the time of the previous review, I have much grown in knowledge about programming in general. Reading about patterns and implementing them in my code base has been extremely useful, so I think I will read the new book more thoroughly and with a critical eye than last time.

There are a few topics which I will have a good look at:

  1. Introduction to the framework at a beginners level. The framework is often considered difficult to lean, so a beginner’s guide should specifically target this area. Explanation of the structure of the framework, the application and the recommended module structure is very important for those users. A common module structure helps users a lot in understanding them.
  2. How to use 3rd party modules and extend them to your own needs. The modular structure can save users a lot of development and maintenance time. Knowing how to handle 3rd party modules can give new users a boost, something I wrote a while ago as well.
  3. Optimisations: where to start looking if you want to increase the performance? It is known the size of the framework is quite a bottleneck and for production sites, it is important to to know where to start if you need to increase the performance of your application. It is an intermediate/advanced stage of understanding the framework, but if you know where to look for optimisations you are already half way.
  4. Lifting the veil about dependency injection and event managers. The framework is a good example to understand design patterns. By using the framework you can get used to things like service mangers, so I really hope Krishna Shasankar V can introduce a tiny bit of those principles.