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The Definitive Guide to Symfony and symfony 1.0 RC1 released by Francois Zaninotto – January 30, 2007 – 40 comments

We are very proud to announce the official release of The Definitive Guide to Symfony, a book that myself and Fabien spent the last months writing. The 490 pages of this book explain all you need to know from starting up symfony to managing a symfony application, with a lot of practical examples and expert tips. It is available in bookstores right now; if you want to order it online, we suggest our publisher's website or amazon.com.

The book is released under a GFDL license, which means that anybody can download the book's content for free. This shouldn't discourage you from buying it though, because the work involved in writing it is really worth its price! The documentation section of the symfony project website has been updated to allow users to browse this book instead of the old documentation. So if you would like to check the book's content before actually buying it, head to the documentation section.

The book's content has been committed to the symfony subversion repository, which should facilitate typo correction and updates. Additionally, given the license of the book, any translation effort lead by the community is greatly facilitated. By the way, we enabled Markdown formatting in the wiki, so you can keep the original formatting in translated versions.

Some lucky symfonians already received their copy of the book a few days ago, but unfortunately we only received ours today. The book is said to be quite good, although we would like to check it personally before recommending it... That's why we kindly ask all the people who have read it to give us their feedback.

We also tagged the 1.0 RC1 release today. We are getting very close to a 1.0 stable, and currently looking for help in bug-hunting. If you are willing to give us a bit of your time, download this release, test it, and report any blocking bug that you may notice.

We hope you will appreciate our work, and we wish you a very pleasant reading.

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Comments

#1 Nyger said on the 2007/01/30 at 02:17

Well that are awesome news! :) I'm so looking forward reading this great symfony documentation! :)

Great work folks! Keep on going!!
cu Nyger
#2 Ian said on the 2007/01/30 at 02:18

I'm so excited to receive my book I can hardly wait! :) Good job guys, I'm very proud of the whole Symfony team and I know this framework will bring great success to Sensio and all Symfony developers!
#3 Eugene Cook said on the 2007/01/30 at 02:20

I actually got the book in the middle of last week. Great stuff...congrats guys.

This is a huge milestone for Symfony.
#4 Lynx said on the 2007/01/30 at 02:29

I finally got my book in the mail today, and have already read three chapters of it, amazing truly amazing I have learned so much already and I have been using Symfony for months. I thought the online book was good, but this is far better.
#5 replicah said on the 2007/01/30 at 03:53

looking forward to getting the book in australia! put the order in last october with amazon
#6 Michael Manley said on the 2007/01/30 at 04:16

Does the content of the book replace and cover everything that was in the old documentation?
#7 Manny said on the 2007/01/30 at 06:50

That's great!! Can't wait to pickup.

Too bad I won't be able to cut and paste changes into the book! I know bad humor
#8 Blue25 said on the 2007/01/30 at 08:17

Is there going to be a downloadable PDF version of the book?
#9 Jon Duell said on the 2007/01/30 at 08:27

Congratulations on the book. Looking forward to reading it. Just a heads up, since moving the documentation over to the online version of the book, all of the links in the askeet tutorial are broken.
#10 flod said on the 2007/01/30 at 08:42

Congrats!
Just ordered my copy from Amazon, so I'll have to patiently wait till the end of Feb. :) Anyway, looking forward to getting my hands on it.
And as blue25, asked, any chance for the PDF downloadable version? The sample chapter you released looks really great, comparing to the HTML version.
#11 FlatPredator said on the 2007/01/30 at 08:55

Great news ... Ordered the book a while ago on amazon and waiting now for shipping :) Nice!
#12 cprior said on the 2007/01/30 at 09:03

And let's not forget that the first commit was done in september 2005, with a usable, stable, well-documented version out in december 05, followed by commercial success in 06 (I hope!) and detailed work towards a v1.0 done in the past months.

Does it occur to anybody that F&F never got lost in some sidetracks but always steered a clear, direct path in development? Very impressive!

Keep on writing|coding|committing!
#13 Stefan said on the 2007/01/30 at 09:29

I've just e-mailed my boss to order it :)

It already looks cool on the picture, so I'm sure it will be worth the money getting it :)
#14 virtualiZe said on the 2007/01/30 at 10:03

i really liked the old documentation style with the more detailed topic descriptions at the starting page and the 'tags' on the right side to easily find what i'm looking for. also i think one could split the chapters into smaller pieces for faster finding some specific detail and i miss the search function.

however, the book looks fantastic from what i've read so far and of course i've ordered the paper version already :)
#15 Pierre said on the 2007/01/30 at 10:03

Is that my failure or is this release package damaged?

[code]imhotep pminnieur # pear upgrade symfony/symfony-beta
downloading symfony-1.0.0rc1.tgz ...
Starting to download symfony-1.0.0rc1.tgz (1,908,284 bytes)
..................done: 1,908,284 bytes
Could not chmod /usr/share/php/docs/symfony/.tmpLICENSE to 644 chmod(): No such file or directory
ERROR: commit failed[/code]
#16 Benoit said on the 2007/01/30 at 10:17

For me, on the biggest annoying thing in symfony, is the configuration with the file database.yml and propel.ini. I went rapidly through the book and found nothing about this issue! Could someone say me if I'm wrong ?
#17 El Riiico said on the 2007/01/30 at 10:34

Cool, Ã§a fait des semaines que je l'ai commandÃ© sur Amazon.
Ma procrastination va pouvoir prendre fin, j'attends de le recevoir (et aussi beaucoup le lancement de la V1.0) pour lancer dans mon nouveau projet en attente avec Symfony.

BientÃ´t un nouvel utilisateur en plus pour votre framework, gare Ã vos fesses s'il ne me plait pas :)

Translation for the english people there: GREAT! :)
#18 z01d said on the 2007/01/30 at 10:50

I think I'll be staring at the picture of the book until mine comes in the mail in Feb.
#19 alessandro said on the 2007/01/30 at 11:31

I got it!
Fantastic job...thanks from italy!
#20 Azahari Zaman said on the 2007/01/30 at 13:47

yeah, finally the book is out, been waiting for this for months. Congrats guys for such a brilliant work. I will definitly buy the book once I have enough cash. :), and perhaps translate it to Bahasa Melayu. Once again, keep up the efforts, love u guys so much.
#21 yutewa00 said on the 2007/01/30 at 14:42

yay ! :D I ordered it back in december and can't wait to get my hands on it :) I think you can buy pdf book from apress for few $ IF you buy printed one first.
#22 Cipher said on the 2007/01/30 at 14:50

Yeah,what a wonderfal news. I pre-order the book since last year. Althought I can execute a project with Symfony already, I still bought the book from Amazon. Hey,if you use symfony framework, you should by one. It is a kind courage to symfony team. Love you and thank you all.
#23 pipp said on the 2007/01/30 at 15:36

Congratulations! Fabien and Francois, you guys are doing a great job. Thanks for the book and for a great framework!
#24 jhice said on the 2007/01/30 at 15:44

Great news !
I'm actually frustrated not having time to work with symfony, but it's on my 2007 wishlist !
Gratz
#25 bladus said on the 2007/01/30 at 16:40

Great!
#26 Dejan Spasic said on the 2007/01/30 at 18:23

Congratulations! Keep on going!

Looking forward to getting the book in germany!
#27 Julie said on the 2007/01/30 at 18:56

Yep, there's a downloadable PDF eBook available. Go to http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=10222, and under the "book details" header on the RHS, click on the link to "purchase as eBook."

If you buy the printed book, you can get the eBook for $10, rather than $20. Check out the back cover for details. (-;
#28 Michael said on the 2007/01/30 at 20:20

I'm honored to purchase your book and just completed Amazon checkout. Thank you for this great framework and keep up the good work. Go Symfony!
#29 snk00sj said on the 2007/01/30 at 20:54

I have been waiting for this for a while now. I had those preordered on amazon since december, i got a mail today to tell me they are sent. can't wait!

tnx fabien keep up the good work
#30 Martin Sanchez said on the 2007/01/30 at 21:38

I just finished reading the book until chapter 11 (AJAX), and I have to say that I'm very impressed with the ease with which one can develop DB applications with Symfony, and with the quality of the book.

The book is well organized, and PHP developers should find it very easy to understand.

I got the book on Jan 24rd from an online store that did not wait until Feb 1st to ship it.

The release of the book and the 1.0 version will sure speed up the adoption of the framework.

I would only add a few more short examples of applications for beginners.

I frankly don't know where Francois and Fabien find time to both develop the Framework and write the book. Amazing!

Congratulations!
#31 Bealers said on the 2007/01/31 at 01:14

Hurry up Amazon.
#32 mogyi said on the 2007/01/31 at 08:39

Already ordered at Amazon, this is a must have! Your framework just rocks!

DÃ©jÃ¡ commandÃ© sur Amazon, c'est un livre indispensable! Votre logiciel est super puissant!

cheers from Hungary!
#33 Muhammad Asif Ali said on the 2007/01/31 at 08:42

Great to have a downloadable option for in pdf format

Thx
#34 COil said on the 2007/01/31 at 09:10

I've got mine, really nice to have an official documentation and book. Thanks !
#35 Daniel Wood said on the 2007/01/31 at 14:21

Awesome stuff guys. My book is ordered. This comes just in time for the start of my next project.
#36 Pierre Minnieur said on the 2007/02/01 at 10:31

Fabien, Francois - Thank you for that great work, both - symfony and your book.

My copy arrived yesterday and I have to say: that's what I've waited for.

Symfony is a great framework, easy to use if you know what you can do and how you can do it.
#37 ksn135 said on the 2007/02/01 at 19:52

Thank you very much for your work !
Do you plan to translate "The Book" to foreign (i mean, non-english) languages ?
#38 adriaan said on the 2007/02/02 at 23:06

Where can I find the old manual. This book doesn't cover the content of the old manual or it isn't easy engouh to find some specific pages.
#39 stephan said on the 2007/02/03 at 19:22

Thanks for this paper version. I'll get it on monday.
Thanks for all you work, your framework is really great.

just like adriaan, I think the old way for getting specific information in the online doc was easier (with the keyword list etc.).
#40 dreadwarrior said on the 2007/02/15 at 09:56

Hey guys! Thank you for your great work! Where can I find the mentioned free version of the book? Is it only available from the trac svn repository? If so, how can I convert the markdown code to a PDF version?

Thanks for any kind reply.

Regards,
dreadwarrior