Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional
Posted on 18 March 2010 by Abidoon
- ISBN13: 9781430209775
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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 Cake… More >>
Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional
Tags | Beginning, CakePHP, from, Novice, Professional
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.
Rating: 4 / 5
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.
Rating: 3 / 5
This isn’t a very good book.
It covers bits of things, and the I did discover some things that i missed in my readings of the cakephp doco – like the belongsTo variable and what not, but not enough. And certainly not enough to validate the price of the book. Without covering (as one reviewer has mentioned) acl, or even really digging into the use of multiple controllers on a page, or, heck, anything deep at all, this is more a nice reference book/tutorial if you live in the stone ages and don’t have access to the internet.
Which begs the question of why you’re on amazon.
I like the “beginning” series, but this one doesn’t really do them justice.
Rating: 2 / 5
goes beyond the cakephp manual. explains things that i did get in the manual. love it!
Rating: 5 / 5
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.
Rating: 2 / 5