Acknowledgments

Writing a book is both exciting and exhausting. Writing a technical book is even more intense. You spend hour after hour trying to figure out how to convey your message, how to explain concepts, and how to provide simple but meaningful and reusable examples.

Writing a book is just impossible to do without people around supporting you along the process.

The biggest support you can have is your family. And I must say I have one of the most comprehensive and supporting family. As an entrepreneur, I already spend most of my time at work. As the lead developer of symfony, I spend most of my free time on hacking the next version of the framework. And then, I decided to write another book. But without the continuous encouragements of my wife, Hélène, and my two wonderful children, Thomas and Lucas, this book would not have been written in such a small amount of time.

You cannot write a book all by yourself, especially a technical one. For this one, I had the chance to benefit from top notch reviewers. They are all part of the symfony adventure and I want to thank them all for the time they spent on the project.

Kris Wallsmith, our community manager and symfony 1.3 release manager, took the time to proof-read my far-from-perfect English prose. As this book was published on a day-to-day basis on the symfony website, and because I live in France, and he lives in the US, he got up very early every single morning during a month, including weekends, to read and fix each chapter.

Stefan Koopmanschap, one of the most active symfony evangelists, took the responsibility to run the Subversion repository for this book. Thanks to his work, you can checkout the code and start reading the book from any chapter.

Fabian Lange, the symfony 1.2 release manager, and the symfony "Windows guy", read the book with a Windows perspective and tried to be our newbie reader. On a side note, he recently bought a Mac so we need someone else to take on the "Windows guy" responsibility.

Jonathan Wage, the Doctrine lead developer, took the time to create a Doctrine edition of the book. Thanks to his great efforts, you can choose between Propel or Doctrine as your main ORM for symfony, and still enjoy the same book.

Pascal Borreli, an online barfly on the symfony french IRC channel, and the most friendly symfony community member, read the book chapter after chapter at the speed of light. His continuous support and his kind words kept me in a good mood to write this book from start to finish.

As the CEO of Sensio, I have a lot of responsibilities. And without the support of the whole Sensio team, writing this book would not have been possible. Special thanks go to Grégory Pascal, my 10 year partner, who was quite skeptical about the Open-Source business model at the start but now embraces it. I also want to thank Laurent Vaquette, my "aide de camp", who simplifies my life on an every day basis, and agrees to come with me from time to time to eat a döner kebab.

I also want to thank all the online readers for the feedback they gave me early on. They have spotted a lot of small and not so small typos, inconsistencies, and not-so-well explained concepts.

By buying an Open-Source book, you, the "offline reader" are my hero. Buying a book that you can read online for free is a testament that you want to actively support the symfony Open-Source project.

Merci à tous !