A while back Julien Pauli offered to ship a copy of his new Zend Framework book over to me, and obviously I was happy to accept :) . I know non-English books don’t get the best publicity so I’m happy to note that Julien’s new book co-authored with Guillaume Ponçon, “Zend Framework: Bien développer en PHP” from Les Cahiers Du Programmeur series will be officially released on the 4th December. You can already find it on Amazon.fr and other French vendors if you do a quick search.

Here’s a snapshot of the book propped up against one of my laptops:

Julien Pauli's French Zend Framework Book Cover

The book just arrived this morning so I’m busy breaking out my French dictionary to supplement my questionable French ;) . I can still read the language, but I fear I’ve lost my talent at speaking it. Shameful I know. I look forward to reading through it in the next few days and posting a full review in the near future.

My first impression is positive. The book has a very clean layout on high grade paper which is unusual enough for run of the mill printed books. It will look great alongside the rest of my collection. It uses a wider page format than you might expect which leaves plenty of room for margin notes. Weighing in at around 450 pages, the contents table is replete with all the topics one would expect including chapters on MVC in the Zend Framework, all the typical components, and appendices (a lot of appendices!) on topics like MVC Theory, Subversion, Databases, Object Oriented Programming, Testing with PHPUnit, etc. It’s a very complete book that should be suitable even for absolute beginners to PHP web application frameworks, or anyone visiting from Ruby/Python/Java.

I’d like to congratulate Julien on the new book. He’s been a steady presence in the ZF community both in proposing and writing components, and in developing the French community of Zend Framework users through efforts like the French speaking community, La communauté francophone du Zend Framework.

If you are interested in reading a bit more, you can view the table of contents and Wil Sinclair’s foreword on the Eyerolles.com site.