This post was published as part of the symfony 2008 advent calendar. As this tutorial might have been updated since then, you are advised to read the last version from the symfony 1.2 documentation (for Propel or Doctrine).

Previously on Jobeet

With the description of the symfony User class yesterday, we have now finished our tour of the fundamental features of symfony. You still need to learn a lot but you should already be able to create simple symfony projects all by yourself.

To celebrate this great milestone, we will have a break today. Or, more precisely, I will have a break today. No tutorial will be published, but I will give you some hints on what you can do today to improve your symfony skills.

Learning by Practicing

The symfony framework, as does any piece of software, has a learning curve. In the learning process, the first step is to learn from practical examples with tutorials or a book like this one. The second step is to practice. Nothing will ever replace practicing.

That's what you can start doing today. Think about the simplest web project that still provides some value: a todo list manager, a simple blog, a time or currency converter, whatever... Choose one and start implementing it with the knowledge you have today. Use the task help messages to learn the different options, browse the code generated by symfony, use a text editor that has PHP auto-completion support like Eclipse, read the online API when you need to find new methods, start asking questions on the user mailing-list, chat on the #symfony IRC channel on freenode.

Enjoy all the free material you have at your disposal to learn more about symfony.

See you Tomorrow

This tutorial is far from finished. In the coming days, we will talk about AJAX support, plugins, internationalization, caching, deployment, and much more.

Please join me tomorrow for a new week of Jobeet.

Published in #Tutorials