Apress
ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-59059-819-1
ISBN-10 (pbk): 1-59059-819-9
ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4302-0279-0
ISBN-10 (electronic): 1-4302-0279-3

I had the opportunity to read through about half of this title this weekend and have to say it looks to become a permanent member of my reference shelf. This book is aimed at moderate to advanced programmers so a basic knowledge of PHP, OOp, Testing and Deployment are assumed. However, anyone trying to get up to speed with the Zend Framework, Php Design Patterns or TDD(Test Driven Design) or TFD(Test First Development) will be well served by adding this title to their library.

There are 5 parts of the book, each covering a general area of the development life cycle with a focus on PHP implementations. Up first is the OOp and Patterns section which gives you a gentle introduction to several OOp topics such as Interfaces, Abstract classes, use of the static level declaration, exceptions and a couple of the most frequently encountered design patterns (Factory and Singleton).

Part 2 covers testing, code level documentation, more testing and continuous development. Tools and libraries under discussion are PHPUnit, DocBook, PHPDoc, Phing, Xinc, XDebug, the Reflection API and a discussion of the Observer pattern. This section is one of the most helpful write ups on using these tools I've come across to date.

Part 3 digs a little deeper into some of the php5 OOp features, specifically the SPL. Given the state of SPL documentation on php.net, this section is an invaluable reference for getting started or quickly reviewing the SPL components. This is highly recommended section for anyone trying to beef up their PHP OOp skills.

Part 4 gets into the inner workings of the MVC pattern and its application in the Zend Framework. There is a lot of good information on the Framework and its use of patterns and how they all work together in this section and is a highly recommended section for anyone trying to move past tutorial driven development with ZF.

Part 5 rounds out this excellent reference with chapters on Ajax with JSON (with ZF examples), Web Services, Advanced Web Services and Certificate Authentication, topics that are often omitted or deferred to more in depth and congested works.

While I've only had a chance to review about half the book's content I can confidently recommend this title to any beginner or intermediate level PHP developer trying to break into the Zend Framework or looking for a gentle introduction into applied XP processes.