Zend Framework 2 for a Zend Framework Newbie

Question

I'd like to use ZF2 for an upcoming project. However, I find it really hard to understand the few tutorials that I've found out there. Most of them just tell you to put stuff in files without really explaining what everything is or any other option I may have.

Is there any book or tutorial for an absolute zf beginner?

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Well, I started using Yii until ZF2 is released.

Yii has just amazed me. In two days I've been able to start building something. It is dead simple, yet powerful. They have great documentation and the framework is very easy to understand and use if you have a good knowledge of MVC and SQL. The documentation on their site is also very good. There are tutorials for absolute beginners. That I liked. Zend may be a more robust and powerful framework, but it's tediously painful to learn. It lacks the simplicity of Yii. I went nuts trying to understand all those configuration lines.

I followed every tutorial recommended in this thread for two weeks and gave up. Telling someone to just enter some code without explaining what it means or how it can be tweaked is not a good way to teach and promote a framework. I'll pick up ZF2 when it's released. I hope they make it friendlier. I hope the documentation also improves and goes from simple to complex examples. I really want to learn the ZF.

Solution 1

There are a number of articles you could read that could help:

• Official documentation - has useful stuff - especially the view quick start
• View Layers, Database Abstraction, Configuration, Oh, My! - Good intro to View Layer & Db
• Getting started writing ZF2 modules - Good intro to modules
• Modules in ZF2 - Another intro to modules
• Using the ZF2 EventManager - introduction to event manager
• PHP Constructor Best Practices And The Prototype Pattern - Zend\Db\ResultSet uses this
• Using the ServiceManager as an Inversion of Control Container - How to use Zend\ServiceManager
• Zend\ServiceManager configuration keys - Useful Zend\ServiceManager information

Also, these blog categories have useful info:

• Matthew Weier O'Phinney's ZF2 articles
• Rob Allen's ZF2 articles
• Matthew Setter's Master Zend Framework

Books:

• Slavey Karadzhov's Learn ZF2
• Matthew Setter's Zend Framework 2 for Beginners

For source code:

• http://modules.zendframework.com/
• https://github.com/akrabat/ZF2TestApp

Solution 2

Rob Allen ZF2 tutorial is now part of the official docs: http://packages.zendframework.com/docs/latest/manual/en/user-guide/overview.html

Also see this post https://stackoverflow.com/a/8894828/760703

Comments

[jcansell]

Rob Allen's official tutorial is useful, but you have to read all the comments below it as errors are not corrected. Its also difficult to follow because the project has been given the same name as one of the objects (Album). I'm also unclear as to why some things are in lower case (album/album/) and which things are 'System' - i.e. Zend\Db\Adaptor\Adaptor.