Introduction

Using a full-stack framework like symfony is one of the easiest ways to increase your speed and efficiency as a web developer. The framework comes bundled with many useful features that help you concentrate on your application's business logic rather than on the implementation on yet another object pager or yet another database abstraction layer. However, this also comes at a cost; learning all the available features and all the built-in configuration possibilities does not happen overnight.

The Practical Symfony book, released at the end of 2008, is a great way for a beginner to learn symfony, understand how it works, and also see best web development practices in action.

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 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.

Despite being the lead developer of symfony, I still use this book from time to time to look for a particular configuration setting, or just browse the book to re-discover some great tips. I hope you will enjoy using it on a day to day basis as much as I do.