Books on symfony

I love books! And I buy a lot of them. When I was young, I dreamt about writing a book. And thanks to symfony, my dream became true two years ago with the publication of the "Definitive Guide to symfony" book, published by APress. This book was co-authored with François Zaninotto and it covers symfony 1.0. Last year, I wrote yet another book on symfony, "Practical symfony", to cover the new symfony 1.2 version. This book has been a huge success online, and was self-published on lulu.com.

Practical symfony

Today, I'm very proud to announce the immediate availability of the second edition of the "Practical symfony" book. This second edition is the result of all the updates we made since the first edition. We have also added an index to ease finding important information. It is the first book published by Sensio Labs as a publisher and it is available at online bookstores, like Amazon.com:

• Practical symfony 1.2 for Doctrine - second edition
• Practical symfony 1.2 for Propel - second edition

As always, you can also read the book for free online (Propel and Doctrine), and you can even download it as a free PDF (Propel and Doctrine).

Symfony : Mieux développer en PHP avec Symfony 1.2 et Doctrine

Being French, many people asked for a French version of the book, and thanks to Eyrolles, you can now enjoy reading the "Symfony : Mieux développer en PHP avec Symfony 1.2 et Doctrine" book. It is an enhanced version of the English book, with more than 480 pages, and three unpublished appendices about the settings.yml and factories.yml configuration files. The book is of course available in traditional bookstores like la Fnac, but also online on amazon.fr.

As I like free stuff, you can download two chapters for free, and all the appendices:

• Concevoir le modèle de données
• Les tests fonctionnels
• Le format YAML, le fichier de configuration settings.yml, le fichier de configuration factories.yml

The symfony 1.2 Reference Guide

Some time ago, I wrote about yet another book on symfony, a symfony reference guide. The "Pratical symfony" book is a great way for a beginner to learn symfony, understand how it works, and also see best web development practices in action. But when you begin working on your own projects, you need a reference guide. A book where you can easily find answers to your questions at your fingertips. The Symfony 1.2 Reference Guide book aims to provide such a guide. It acts as a complementary book to Practical symfony. This is a book you will keep with you whenever you develop with symfony. This book is the fastest way to find every available configuration thanks to a very detailed table of contents, an index of terms, cross-references inside the chapters, tables, and much more. Here is the table of contents:

• The YAML Format
• Configuration File Principles
• The settings.yml Configuration File
• The factories.yml Configuration File
• The generator.yml Configuration File
• The databases.yml Configuration File
• The security.yml Configuration File
• The cache.yml Configuration File
• The routing.yml Configuration File
• The app.yml Configuration File
• The filters.yml Configuration File
• The view.yml Configuration File
• Other Configuration Files
• Events
• Tasks

Published by Sensio Labs, the "Symfony 1.2 Reference Guide" book will be available sometime later this month as a printed book. To give you the gist of the book, I have made three chapters available for download now as PDF files:

• The settings.yml Configuration File
• The factories.yml Configuration File
• Events

The Guide to Doctrine 1.0

If you follow me on Twitter and use Doctrine as your preferred ORM, you are probably aware that Sensio Labs will also publish a book on Doctrine soon. Written by the Doctrine core team (Jonathan Wage, Konsta Vesterinen, Roman S. Borschel, and Guilherme Blanco), this book will be the definitive guide on Doctrine 1.0.

I hope you will enjoy reading the symfony documentation on paper!