Excerpts from the Description:

Developing a new web application should not mean reinventing the wheel. That's why a framework is an essential item in your development toolbox. It helps you respect coding standards; write bulletproof, maintainable code; and focus on business rules rather than waste time on repetitive tasks. This book introduces you to symfony, the leading framework for PHP developers, showing you how to wield its many features to develop web applications faster and more efficiently, even if you only know a bit of PHP.

In The Definitive Guide to symfony, you will learn about the Model-View-Controller architecture and the crucial role it plays in making frameworks like symfony possible. The book also covers framework installation and configuration, and shows you how to build pages, deal with templates, manage requests and sessions, and communicate with databases and servers. You will see how symfony can make your life easier by effectively managing form data, enhancing the user experience with Ajax, internationalizing applications for a global audience, and using smart URLs. Authors François Zaninotto and Fabien Potencier put a strong emphasis on the tools that symfony provides for professional environments, showing you how to take advantage of unit tests, scaffolding, plug-ins, the command line, and extensible configuration. And since frameworks often raise performance-related debate, this book will give you many tips and techniques for monitoring and improving your application's performance, from caching to expert configuration tweaks.

Always keen to offer practical instruction, the authors include a lot of code examples, expert tips, best practices, and illustrations throughout this book, with the goal of providing a resource that satisfies the educational needs of symfony's rapidly growing user community.

Reviews:

Amazon.com

:) "Each chapter walks you through an important framework element from installation and setup to advanced features (cache control, plugin development, optimizing applications). It's written by two of the framework's lead developers. I would consider it a must-have for anyone using the Symfony framework."

:) "What separates symfony from the rest of the frameworks at the moment is the documentation. Every noteworthy feature and approach is documented in the book and the Askeet tutorial is great for real-life implementations. If you are serious about Symfony, get this book."