I had been itching to dive into the Zend Framework, so I jumped at the opportunity. It has taken me a while to get around to reviewing it, but I'm glad I did. Jason's writing style makes challenging concepts easy to learn and his focus on good development practices are sure to inspire you to become a better developer. Here's more detail on what I thought after reading the book...

He talks about the things he likes - like the fact that the book uses a single application to base the examples on and that it focuses on the development process as well as the end result. He notes that the book struggles a bit when trying to find a target audience. He felt the book jumped around from beginner to advanced topics quickly and that a less experienced user might get confused. Overall, though, he found the book a good addition to any developer's library.

The design patterns you've seen so far greatly improve the readability and maintainability of script internals; however, none have confronted a fundamental requirement and challenge of architecting and developing web applications: connecting to a database. This chapter and the next two chapters-Table Data Gateway and Data Mapper-provide three design patterns that better organize how your application interacts with a database.

This pattern allows you to treat database connections (abstracted, of course) the same no matter what's behind them because their interface is handled through objects. In this tutorial, they use the ADOdb libraries to accomplish this...]]> Thu, 22 Dec 2005 11:12:12 -0600