Planet CakePHP

In recent months, new documentation for CakePHP has been rolling off the press. I’m pleased to forward on to you the newest addition, Kai Chan and John Omokore’s Practical CakePHP Projects. In this post, I’ll give my review of the book, which I hope proves useful for you interested Cake users out there.
Contents
The chapters, in general, focus on one project at a time. In order, here are the projects you’ll build with the book:

• Blog (of course… :) )
• Shopping Cart
• Message Forum Web Service
• Google Maps App
• Twitter and Google Translator Mashups
• Unit and Web Tests
• Control Panel
• Translation
• Custom Automagic Fields
• Templates/Tags
• Dynamic Data Fields
• Captcha

These projects aren’t designed to be absolutely conclusive, in other words, when building the shopping cart, you won’t be building a complete cart solution like ZenCart or Magento (this would probably end up being a book all by itself). But, the tutorials do apply Cake principles to application development and will produce a working application that performs useful methods and tasks.
Pluses
Why I’d encourage you to buy the book… If you’re like me, you want to see code samples of live apps that you can tinker with. In fact, the best way I learn anything is to see working code and dissect it, and manipulate it until I know what’s going on and how I can use it to fit my needs. In theory, my Beginning CakePHP book wanted to ground the reader in the overall principles of Cake development, and though I was pleased with how much code samples I was able to include, it was a fine line between overloading the reader in early phases of learning Cake and giving just the right amount of working code. In other words, I feared putting out too much code that may not make sense to beginners without explaining what was happening.
Well, Practical CakePHP Projects takes on a different theory. In a way, it assumes you’ve read my book or an introduction like it, and goes from there. The chapter on “Cake Fundamentals” does explain some basics for getting a Cake app going, but it still presupposes some knowledge in the framework. Practical CakePHP Projects gives you lots of code, with explanations of what’s happening, but is not so nit-picky that you get drawn out definitions of every line. For the coder familiar with Cake but wanting to see it applied to various projects, this is your book, and it does this well.
Minuses
Though I worked as the technical reviewer on this book, I hope this post here isn’t overly biased. No book is perfect, and useful feedback will help us all as we try to use Cake and make it a better and more widely used platform. I will be upfront: I do have an interest in this book’s success, though I don’t get paid at all for its sales or anything. My interest is two-fold: I’ve had a great experience with Apress and I’ve been spared many an hour due to Cake’s awesomeness. I truly want to see Cake see wider acceptance and use, and the first step is that the platform be sweet (which it is) and the second step is to make the documentation understandable, easy, useful, accessible, etc. Like business gurus know all too well about location, for an emerging platform it’s all about “documentation, documentation, documentation.”
Practical CakePHP Projects adds to the repertoire of Cake docs that leads new users in the right path. But some code samples overly use the controller when a better paradigm would distribute code across the MVC. But let me fore-mention this, and I still believe you’ll have a good experience with the book. Super advanced readers might quibble over some of the code or concepts, but that’s unavoidable. What’s important is that those readers who currently are new to Cake or are looking for ways to improve their working knowledge of the framework get good documentation and useful examples to work with, which I believe this book will do for you. So my own issues with the book included the dependence on the controller to get things done, some naming conventions, and, really only the Captcha chapter. Aside from these concerns, which I believe are minimal, I’m excited about having in one book a nice assortment of applied Cake code.
From Here…
Now, in this sense, I’m definitely biased: I’d love to see you read my book “Beginning CakePHP” (can’t get on my case for that, would you?). But if that’s not in your plans, at least give Practical CakePHP Projects a try. It does operate in a different mind-set, one of giving you lots of code samples to work with, and so getting your feet wet in Cake won’t take long at all with this book. If my book and this one are in your plans, I’d expect after reading these two that you’ll have a firm grounding in Cake and will be ready for as advanced methods as Cake can offer you.
If you’d like more specific reactions about the book, please catch me in Readers’ Forum or drop me line through my contact form. And, from one Cake baker to another, Happy Baking!