Practical CakePHP Projects (Practical Projects)

If you?ve been using PHP for sometime now and would like to start using a web framework, you?ll want to try CakePHP, which is an open source rapid development web framework built on PHP.

PHP experts Kai Chan and John Omokore guide you through a variety of practical CakePHP applications. You will work on projects such as a video gallery, unit testing application, an e?commerce app, a blog site, and much more. Practical CakePHP Projects covers the key architectural concepts as well as including mini projects that you can use to enhance your own applications.

A friendly introduction for any web programmer looking to choose a PHP framework Real?world projects based on current and future trends Practical CakePHP techniques that you can use right away
What you?ll learn Painlessly create a secure and dynamic web site with CakePHP and MySQL. Discover how CakePHP can be used in high?level and demanding applications using CakePHP built?in components as well as methods such as Smarty, caching, and unit testing. See how CakePHP integrates with technologies such as Ajax and web services. Integrate your own components into CakePHP?s framework. Apply CakePHP to mainstream technologies such as Google Video, blogging, mashups, and e?commerce. Work through the few pitfalls of some of the CakePHP framework, for example, Access Control Lists.
Who is this book for?

Aimed primarily at CakePHP novices to professionals and PHP programmers seeking to build web applications easily using CakePHP and related web technologies, this book will also appeal to programmers using other frameworks in other languages, for example, Ruby on Rails and Java Spring.

About the Apress Practical Series

The Practical series from Apress is your best choice for getting the job done, period. From professional to expert, this series lets you apply project?motivated templates (or frameworks) step by step in a very direct, practical, and efficient manner toward current real?world projects that may be sitting on your desk. So whatever your career goal, Apress can be your trusted guide to take you where you want to go on your IT career empowerment path.

User review
Wealth of information, but choppy and completely disorganized
When I got my hands on this book to learn cakePHP , I was pretty excited to start learning a new framework - but I was completely disappointed while going through the first 2 chapters, I did read a couple of more chapters, but honestly could not finish reading/practicing from this book and learning anything concrete

(1) The book is choppy and completely disorganized - the author goes into various tangents without any contexts. Example, in the very first chapter, he goes about explaining cake database configuration class without even getting into some simple fundamentals of cakePHP.
(2) No clear demarcation between standard PHP and cakePHP - this make it very confusing in either way - if you are coming from a PHP background or even if you are a novice.

Stay away from this book. Try the 'Cake PHP application development' by Ahsanul Bari and Anupom Syam - I am right now half way through and finding it much much better than this book.

User review
Worthless Without Source Code
I am a well-versed PHP developer but only marginally familiar with Cake. I was amazed to see the great depth of how the book delved into a few great issues like Access Control Lists and a control panel to ease security settings as well as how to do database-level internationalization so I quickly thought the book would be invaluable. I spent hours reading the book and manually typing in all the code in the samples to be `hands on` and watch the code grow into completion only to find that MAJOR critical pieces of the code were completely undocumented and missing from the sample code listings. My projects ended up looking nothing like their screenshots or samples and none of the advanced topics worked at all without essentially copying over their sample code into my directory because so many pieces were missing. Great code samples, poor presentation, poor publishing in my opinion.

User review
,,.Complete value for money,,.
In one of the most unusual way the first chapter summarized the main features of Cake and how it structures a web application. The chapter avoids beating around the bush for those who intend to hit the ground with the framework. The second chapter to me is not far off from what was treated at the official Cake website, but blogging is important when juggling on the internet and so a necessary topic in web development texts. As a matter of preference, the way blogging is treated in this book is OK. It was finally buttered with Cake' helpers features for creating an RSS feed.

There is evidence of best practices by following Cake convention and auto magically providing thin code snippets - straight to the point. E-commerce usually is a difficult topic to be treated fully in a chapter and trying to do so is like killing an elephant with a kitchen knife. I found the way the e-commerce topic is treated to be a bilk, but hey! the topic is usually for a whole book or more pages than treated in this book. Although, there is no need to treat more than a checkout payment topic - Surprising the book tries to treat more than one payment system. I appreciate the extra effort the authors take to cover this subject.
The rest of the book proceeds through the various web development topics that certainly makes it far better than any other book written on Cake in the market. It includes projects topics such as e-commerce, Message Forum Web Services, Google Maps and the Travel Salesman, A Twitter/Google translator mash-up, Unit Testing, An ACL-enabled control panel, Internationalization using behaviours, A Cake Control Panel, Translating Stories, Dynamic Data Fields, Captcha, and so on which are quite interesting. However, these topics cover the framework' advanced features with the necessary profundity that many developers, even those who would class themselves beyond intermediate, will get something practical out of the book.

By and large, I found the book to be brilliant for its target audience of beginning to intermediate Cake programmers (It makes you not to be afraid of using a framework for developing PHP) and still very valuable to experienced developers. Thus, I recommend it without hesitation for programmers who are familiar with some PHP but know only a modest Cake. Experienced developers should purchase it for its excellent coverage of the interesting topics aforementioned.

Finally, I will encourage the authors to contribute some of the practical projects /components to the Cake foundation - official website[,,.].


User review
Good for newer users
Practical CakePHP Projects is published by Apress, intended for for developers familiar with PHP, and at least marginally familiar with CakePHP as well. The book starts with some introductory material, then moves on to twelve chapters of practical project implementation. If you're not familiar with CakePHP, it's a rapid application framework for PHP. It cuts out a large swath of redundant tasks needed in everyday web development. It's a mature framework with a fantastic community I'd recommend you check out.

Honestly, the first impression of the book isn't great (stick with me though, it gets much better). First, as a member of the core CakePHP team, it's always a bit disappointing to see a book coming from people I'm not familiar with. I'd suggest prospective authors get their feet wet contributing to the community in a significant way before moving straight on to commercial publishing. The lack of community interaction shows in the first chapter-it's essentially a rehash of material that is better found in CakePHP's official online documentation. It's going to be more up to date, and there's really no reason to have it in the book.

You'll probably want to skip right to chapter 2, where the title of the book comes into play - actual projects created in CakePHP. In general, the specific project chapters are technically accurate and easy to follow. Newcomers to the CakePHP field will enjoy the examples and code they can pick through to better see the big picture.

Having said that, some chapters seem much more relevant than others. For example, leading out with a blog application (which is usually the first example new users are pointed to in the official documentation) seems a bit redundant. They don't cover much new ground there, focusing on vanilla MVC interactions. There's a bit of a diversion into the creation of RSS feeds, but that's more or less covered in the official manual as well.

The following chapter covering a simple e-commerce application is similarly uninteresting. More vanilla MVC, peppered with a bit of Google Checkout and PayPal `integration` at the end, which unfortunately only amounts to rendering some buttons that hand users along to their respective payment engines.

New users may appreciate these chapters, but you'll probably find comparable overviews of Cake's underpinnings in blogs, the CakePHP Bakery, and in the official manual.

The remaining chapters of the book (4-13) is where the book really shines. Project examples are varied, and each idea is inviting and innovative:
A message forum webservice
Google maps for traveling salesmen
A Twitter/Google translator mash-up
Unit Testing (not so much, but stay with me)
An ACL-enabled control panel
Internationalization using behaviors
Custom automagic fields
Custom view tags integrated with plugins
`Dynamic Data Fields` (not that CakePHP specific, but interesting to some)
Captcha (which is more of an example with controller/component callbacks)

My impression of the remaining chapters was positive. The steps are easy to follow and seem well-explained to me. The code inserted onto the printed page gets a big hefty in places (three consecutive pages in chapter 9), but that's to be expected in some instances, I suppose. It's a programming book, after all.

Best practices seem to be evident as well - keeping your models thick and your controllers thin, not repeating code, and following CakePHP convention in order to take advantage of automagic are all present.

Aside from the rehash that is the introduction and first few chapters, the authors seem to avoid that in the rest of the book. Each chapter is atomic enough to pick up on its own (more or less), yet you don't have to be re-introduced to covered topics each time you move on.

Putting my own personal grudge of people publishing before contributing to the core effort aside, I'd recommend the book to users who are getting started with CakePHP. Experienced users have probably seen most of what's here, but new users will enjoy example after example of good CakePHP code in interesting, practical projects.



User review
Very frustrating experience
It has been a very frustrating experience for me, trying to decipher this book (to put it nicely).
I only got to the third chapter of it, but I simply cannot follow anymore.
It is a pain to waste my time trying to discover where the errors are coming from, rather than learning something.
It feels like the authors made a puzzle for the reader. The code is not explained at all, half the time I have no idea what they are talking about and when I finally figure it out, I realize that the links used are all wrong, components used in examples don't exist at all, some methods are all twisted involving 3-4 other methods in other different classes, when everything could have been done in a few lines of code in the same method,,.
Extremely annoying.
Not `practical` at all.


Valentina Scharpf