I had a lot of programming experience in C, Fortran, etc, but zero web programming experience when I bought this book along with a number of others on html, css, php, mysql, javascript, ajax, and another on Zend Framework. Out of them all, I found myself spending about 80% of my time with this book. I think the reason was that it acted as a roadmap for what I needed to learn about next to understand how to build a real-life non-trivial web 2.0 application. It doesn't go into a huge amount of detail on any one aspect. Instead it presents a series of real-life problems to solve in the context of implementing a very well-chosen sample application.
It explores one or two ways to solve each problem making best use of the Framework. It then settles on a particular way to do it in the sample, usually with very good explanations for why he chooses the solution he does, and provides lots of references to good, current online sources of information about other choices as well as more detail on the one chosen. A lot of other (thicker) books, as well as the Zend Framework Reference Manual, and much of the online information in forums, try to demonstrate how many different ways the author knows how to skin a cat, and go into detail on each one, without ever giving any guidance on how to choose among them. An alternative is overview books that are a lot thinner, but they don't give enough detail to actually build anything significant. This book strikes a happy middle ground with good overview material showing how the big pieces fit together, discussion of alternative solutions with references providing details on them all, and then real code implementing one or two of the choices. There are separate stand-alone code examples that help explain alternatives, but each chapter provides code that contributes to a single application that ties it all together, and that can be downloaded and run. There might have been one or two minor problems that I encountered getting it to run (on XP with XAMPP for Windows 1.7.3 and Zend Framework 1.10.7), but even though I had never seen php code before, it wasn't very hard to get it running.
The book is also very current, and it works to present current best practices. Another review mentioned that choosing to use Doctrine instead of Zend_Db seemed like a bad idea. But I would argue that there are plenty of good references and examples of code using Zend_Db. Doctrine really seems to be gaining traction, and using it within Zend Framework is something someone just starting to use the framework would be better off learning than Zend_Db. You go to a framework to get some leverage on complex problems, and Doctrine gives you so much more leverage than Zend_Db. That choice also serves as a demonstration for how extensible and flexible the framework is, which is important for a new user to understand.
Of the 17 books on various aspects of web programming that I can see from where I'm sitting, this is the only one with noticeable wear.
