CakePHP Application Development

Author: Ahsanul Bari and Anupom Syam
Paperback: 332 pages
Publisher: Packt Publishing (June 30, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1847193897
ISBN-13: 978-1847193896
Format: pdf






As the first book to come out on CakePHP, there was a lot of pressure on this title to be really strong. On the whole, it has pretty good coverage of the topic, but the flow of the title is undermined by shoddy editing.
This title is a pretty decent introduction to CakePHP. Coming from a background in PHP and having worked with Ruby on Rails for a few years as well, I think the authors did a good job covering the basics and putting together some interesting projects for you to work on.

User Review:
Having had some experience developing with PHP, I decided to look around for a PHP framework. I was at the point of starting to think about developing reusable modules for handling common tasks that I had run into (user authentication, form handling, database calls etc..) and so it seemed logical to see if anyone had developed something along those lines already. CakePHP seemed to fit the bill perfectly - a PHP framework built by a dedicated group of developers using best software practices - but the documentation I found online was a bit lacking, especially to get past the initial hurdles; so I purchased both CakePHP books available at the current time (8/2008): this one and "Beginning CakePHP" from Apress.

This book was exactly what I was looking for, and got me up to speed with the basic CakePHP mvc paradigm, and how to build a basic CakePHP application. I particularly liked the format of the book and the way the code was presented - after every new piece of code is introduced and run there is a paragraph called "what just happened?" that steps line by line through the code (no matter how basic it may seem to a seasoned CakePHP developer). I wish more programming books would follow this approach, because it makes sure that the reader knows what's going on every step of the way, even if something was a bit unclear earlier. On a side note, I found the Apress much more confusing in that regard, as if you glazed over something at any point, it became really hard to comprehend any of the chapters that followed. (not to mention the author's tendency to 'be clever' and use things like PHP shorthand notation for echo, use the PHP function 'compact' with the CakePHP 'set' function to pass data to the view etc... all little things that unnecessarily add hurdles for the novice's comprehension).

Anyway, I enjoyed this book a lot, it gave me the CakePHP basics and I now feel a lot more comfortable browsing the online CakePHP documentation. If there's one negative I have, it's the AJAX chapter which I had a hard time following. But I haven't found a good CakePHP AJAX example online either, so I've gone back to learning some basic PHP/ajax first in the hope that CakePHP's ajax helper will make more sense after. AJAX is just a small section in the "advanced topics" of this book though so it's probably a bit much to expect the subject to be done justice in such a short space.

As a primer on CakePHP for someone familiar with the basics of PHP and web database development however, this book is ideal.


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