In a new post to his blog Jani Hartikainen wonders if, out of all the PHP frameworks out there, the Zend Framework is the right one for those new to the scene should be starting with.

I've heard some inexperienced PHP programmers say that Zend Framework is confusing to them. Until today, I have agreed: Zend Framework has a lot of classes and some of them are quite complex (such as Zend_Form). But does that actually make it more difficult for inexperienced programmers than other frameworks?

He argues a bit for and against, noting that the ZF docs can eb a bit thin in places but that the framework's architecture more than makes up for it (even if you're not completely sure how it works, you drop it in and it still does). He also mentions some of the hurdles they've had at his work trying to get yunger developers up to speed in their development with the framework.