Familiarizing with the Zend Framework in one week

Question

You are conversant with the ZF?

How would you go about getting familiar with it in one week?

What would be your suggested schedule?

Answer 1

If you have a few years of experience with PHP and are familiar with MVC frameworks, then you shouldn't have a problem to be familiar with ZF in one week. You're not going to be a guru, but you'll be able to get things done.

My plan (and what I actually did few years ago), would be to start with "ZF QuickStart", build the base of your application. Don't just read, code & try. Then follow the rest of "Learning ZF", skipping parts that you're not going to use (eg. if you're not going to be using Lucene, just skip that). Then as code your app, whenever you need more information on some of the components, just go to the "ZF Reference Manual". You probably will only need to use small fraction of what's covered there.

Answer 2

First I recommend the free online book at http://www.survivethedeepend.com/zendframeworkbook/en/1.0 which covers more of the big picture for developing with Zend Framework.

While you're reading the book, I suggest you to build a small App, for instance I built a small app for managing a Todo-list.

Then dig in into the individual Components as you need them. The Zend Framework manual (at http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/) is really good at this. If you look for a more detailed documentation of single classes, try the API Docs at http://framework.zend.com/docs/api

Answer 3

Zend Framework is huge and doesn't focus on anything particular. It has lots of components for lots of stuff (Feeds, MVC, Web Services, PDF etc.). You probably only need a subset of the functionality it provides. Best way to get up to speed with ZF is to read the documentation per library you're interested in and start hacking together some code that uses those libraries.