Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in Web Development)

I have mixed feelings... I think if the book was just now published and in sync with the current cake API I'd give it 4-5 stars.Overall I am liking the book as it does a pretty thorough job of explaining things, unlike tutorials that just show you how to do things, but not explain them. This book explains almost everything.However, just a bare 6-7 months in print and this book is already sadly obsolete. Many of the code examples don't work any longer as the API for cakePHP has already changed significantly. I have spent more time trying to chase down the fixes/changes than I am making progress in the book and I'm getting frustrated. The author responds to errata eventually, but seems to take awhile. Meanwhile you can post your questions (or search for them) in his Forum or Blog. I've posted to both places but I'm not sure the author is replying to them any longer, fortunately other people are!I could wish that the author would try to keep the code snippets updated on his blog, forum or in the errata. I think anyone writing a book like this has to understand how quickly the book is going to be out-of-date and make some effort to communicate changes to his audience, otherwise they'll just end up annoyed like me.So would I recommend this book? Yes, with the caveat that you'll need to dig for fixes constantly and progress might be very slow.

I doubt that this is the right book for a novice. This text is a bit dense and difficult to pick through, it probably could have used a more forceful technical editor. Longer could be better, if adding more pages opened up the prose.An appendix which details methods and properties would be helpful. (I prefer some of the other Apress Novice->Pro titles that layout all of the tools and parts and say "Here's what's in the toolbox, here's the materials, don't worry about knowing how to use them all right away, but know they exist. Now let's build a little something.")The CakePHP online "Cookbook" is clearer and better organized than this text. And, I'm not sure that this book really expands the Cookbook in a helpful way. I also don't like PHP shorttags or echo "short-circuit syntax" as used in this book. I find them harder to read, and the Apress PHP book by Gilmore advises against using them.

So far I like the writing, but the examples didn't work until I learned that the file naming conventions changed when Version 2.0 was released. Ex. "my_things_controller.php" becomes "MyThingsController.php".

This book is not an instruction manual on CakePHP. It's really an overview, with a little CakePHP thrown in. It is for an old version of CakePHP, you'll get many errors that you'll have no idea how to solve if you use a current version of CakePHP. It's both wordy on preaching about Cake's pluses and too dense and assumes the reader knows things about Cake you turn to books like this for. It fails at explaining syntax of CakePHP. It fails at giving examples. It fails at all but the most basic, rudimentry tasks. This is more like: "CakePHP: From Novice to 'I kinda get it.'"The Author explains how things work but neglects to show the reader the proper syntax is some cases, often leaving more advanced configuration answers out of the book. He'll tell you about a parameter but not show a single line of code that explains the syntax needed to activate it. Excerpt: "For more control, you may want to enter more parameters for the "has many" Relationship:" Where to enter those parameters? I have no idea.Also, this is supposed to be a tutorial book and the author leave us to our own devices to construct relationships in cake when we've never used Cake, saying, "Just follow the association rules" which aren't laid out clearly in the chapter that handles them.The meat of the book is a bit better, but explains things in reverse order. Instead of giving us an example, and then explaining it, he explains everything then gives us an example.Routing is another mystery to me still since the author shows you the default routes but then glosses over other routes, expecting you to know the implications of what he's failed to clearly explain.Also, this book uses one example -- a blog -- the entire book. This would be fine if it weren't for the fact that there's a free CakePHP blog tutorial online. But really this book is simply a tough way to learn CakePHP. Save you money and look elsewhere.

I was a complete novice when I started this book, and went on to create a business from what I learned in it's pages. From novice to professional. I wished he would write something about Cake 2.x

As intro books go, the author is pretty long-winded upfront (and seems to repeat himself). I wish he would get to some examples fasterAlso - with the kindle version, the code snippets were pasted in as image blocks - this means that you can't copy/paste out code when following the examples. Strangely enough, the body text of the book is selectable, just not the code areas. Major Fail

I have read many books on programming over the past few years, and this is one of the worst ones, simply because of the way it is written.The text manages to be extremely dense and yet, at the same time, does not contain much useful information. Examples are not well explained, major concepts fail to be presented in a clear and concise matter. And certain things, which get explained in great detail still do not make sense.I am half way through the book, and it has been a grueling experience.

goes beyond the cakephp manual. explains things that i did get in the manual. love it!