It is a book I don’t like, because, in my opinion, it was not written with the reader in mind…

The authors show a lot of (not always well-written) code, but somehow they forgot what they wanted to teach. In the foreground are the “practical” examples and all the (unimportant) details of those examples, and not things you as a reader may want to learn like pagination, i18n, ACL, testing, etc., those topics are put into the background. And sometimes I really wished there would be more meat on the bone, for example in the chapter about testing. One simple unit test case (plus a hypothetical fixture) and a web test case is not much…

On the positive side is to mention the diversity of the examples, they range from a web service to custom tags.

But in the end I have to say the book doesn’t fulfill (at least for me) what is promised on the cover: “Learn how to create dynamic web sites with CakePHP by working through practical examples from the experts”.

Reviews by others:

• John David Anderson

PS: You can download the first chapter, “Cake Fundamentals”, from Apress’ website.

The book consists of four parts: Getting Started, Developing CakePHP Applications, Advanced CakePHP, and Appendixes.

“Getting Started” is about installing CakePHP and creating a very simple (and scaffolded) todo list application.

The start of the second part, “Developing CakePHP Applications”, is a bit strange: it begins with the naming conventions of (almost) all CakePHP “elements” (i.e. models, views, controllers, etc.). It’s well written, but if you are a beginner you probably don’t want to know the naming conventions of something you don’t know yet. Then the book goes on with using models, views, and controllers. Also the bake script is introduced. This part ends with an introduction to CakePHP’s Ajax functionality (including a jQuery example). As example application, a blog is used in this and the next part.

The third part, “Advanced CakePHP”, covers everything else. Ok, I’m joking ;-) It starts with the built-in helpers: HtmlHelper and FormHelper are explained in detail, whereas for the other built-in helpers only a list of their methods is provided. Not that useful in my opinion, as you can find the same information in the online API documentation. Next follows a chapter about routes which also covers advanced stuff like magic variables. From the core components the following components are explained: Auth, Session, Cookie, and Email. Plus some utility classes like HttpSocket. An entire chapter is dedicated to “vendors”, it not only covers the App::import() functionality, but also how to use functionality from the Zend framework in CakePHP. This part ends with two chapters about plugins, and data sources and behaviors.

The appendixes cover installation issues and a comparison of CakePHP with other (PHP) frameworks. A third appendix, “Cake 1.2 Functions and Properties”, can be downloaded from the author’s site.

What I liked about the book is that it is well written and covers a lot of the functionality provided by CakePHP. And it surprised me with things I didn’t expect in a book for CakePHP beginners, like using functionality from the Zend framework, or the explanation of data sources. A nice add-on is that the author has set up a forum for questions related to the book.

What I didn’t like is that the example application, the blog, is put into the background, i.e. you don’t have the feeling like you are building an application. Sometimes the blog application is used for the examples, sometimes not.

It’s not the author’s fault, but some things are already outdated (the book uses the beta version resp. RC 1 of CakePHP 1.2).

Anyway, this book is a good introduction to CakePHP and provides a good foundation, but you have to be aware that it doesn’t make you a professional as promised in the book title. For that you have to program, program, program ;-)

The book is directed at CakePHP newbies, and consists of three parts: introduction and first steps, explanation of the basic concepts, and building a real application.

The first part starts with a high-level introduction to CakePHP and MVC. Next follows a chapter about the installation. My impression of that chapter is mixed: on the one hand it explains in detail how to download CakePHP (including four screenshots *g*), on the other hand the chapter ends with CakePHP’s start screen showing a notice (“Please change the value of Security.salt…”) and that database.php is not available. Even though both issues are covered later in the book, it would make sense to address them in the installation chapter. Or maybe it should be merged with the next chapter, which is about building the first application (a simple to-do-list application). It’s a good decision of the authors to bake this first application manually (i.e. without scaffolding and the bake script).

The second part covers the basic concepts of CakePHP: controllers including components (see sample chapter), models, and views (including layouts, elements, and helpers). Plus the bake script. For some reason model behaviors and plugins are not covered…

Especially with the model chapters you have to be careful, because some information is already outdated (the authors used CakePHP 1.2 beta and release candidate 1 (RC1)). For example, the methods generateList() and execute() no longer exist in the current RC2, and in conditions you now have to use:

'conditions' => array('ModelName.field_name comparison_operator' => 'value')

instead of

'conditions' => array('ModelName.field_name' => 'comparison_operator value')

What I didn’t like is the chapter about bake. I think bake is quite self-explanatory and hence it is not necessary to explain each step. The respective pages would have been better used to describe how to write your own shell scripts…

In the third part a Q&A (Questions & Answers) application is built from scratch. It starts with applying of what has been learned in the first two parts. Then follow two chapters dedicated to user authentication and AJAX, respectively. And finally there is a chapter covering pagination and RSS feeds, among other things.

What I liked about the book is the example-driven approach and how the book is structured. Throughout the book the same pattern is used: First comes a short introduction describing what will be done in the respective section. Then follows a “Time for Action”, a step-by-step guide of what has to be done. And last, but not least, comes a “What Just Happened?” part with explanations of what was done during the “Time for Action”.

What I didn’t like is the formatting of the code snippets: the indentation of the code looks rather randomly. Another distracting thing is that the proofreader was not very good in catching typos ;-)

All in all the book is a decent introduction to CakePHP with some weaknesses.

Reviews by others (in chronological order):

• Chris Hartjes
• teknoid (I don’t know his real name)
• Jonathan Snook
• Mark Story
• YYZtech.ca
• Jason Leveille
• Nik Chankov
• Matt Curry
• Steven de Boer
• Dmitry Dulepov
• Eelco Wiersma

There are also at least two other books under way: “Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional” by David Golding, and “CakePHP – Das Praxisbuch” (in German) by Timo Derstappen.

All those books are scheduled for the second half of this year, so it is still a bit until they are released…

(if you understand Japanese you may have a look at amazon.co.jp, as there are already two CakePHP books available in Japanese)

Update (2008-04-08): There is another German CakePHP book coming with the title “Webentwicklung mit CakePHP.

Update (2008-06-15): Another English book is coming soon with the title CakePHP Application Development, co-authored by Ahsanul Bari.

Update (2008-08-10): The books Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional and CakePHP Application Development have been released and are now available via Amazon (or other book stores). Another English CakePHP book is also coming soon: Practical CakePHP Projects.

You can download a preview of the book as a PDF from David Golding’s website: http://www.davidgoldingdesign.com/newbie-cakephp.pdf.

Update 2007-07-31: There exists now a forum for the book.