Tutorial Review

Getting Started with Zend Framework
by Rob Allen

General impressions:

Overall this tutorial is very thorough. It covers the basics of installation and gives detailed explanations of the steps shown in the tutorial. The application it guides you through creating is general in purpose and can easily be applied to any application that deals with database interaction & web forms.

What it can teach you:

Basic use of the ZF Tool, used to start new projects and perform other actions easily (such as creating classes).

How to setup a new Zend Framework project.

Proper use of the MVC pattern.

Explains the required naming conventions when creating new objects.

How to configure your database connection using the application.ini

Create models to extend Zend_Db_Table_Abstract, used to interact with the database

Explains the use of Layouts & View Scripts

Post tutorial:

After completing this tutorial, I felt much more confident in the basics of the Zend Framework. Afterwards, I began re-writing one of my old PHP applications using these techniques. It was easy to transfer the knowledge provided from this tutorial and begin re-writing my image uploading application. I really enjoyed how easy it was to create the forms & have proper form validation without having to write it myself.

The only thing I didn't enjoy was that the tutorial is a .PDF file - but hey, there had to be something.

I highly recommend this tutorial to anyone starting out with the Zend Framework.

You can find it at: http://akrabat.com/zend-framework-tutorial/

Please leave a comment letting me know what you thought about the tutorial!