I'm delighted to be able to announce that Ryan Mauger and myself have agreed with Manning to write a new book on Zend Framework 2.0. to be called Zend Framework 2 in Action! It's very early days, so we have planned the Table of Contents, but have very little manuscript. The current plan is to cover the major components of Zend Framework 2 in the context of a long running application that we will start in chapter 2 and then build upon as we go through each chapter.

The book will cover topics like creating Zend Framework applications, bootstrapping, modules, Doctrine 2 integration, caching, making and consuming web services and migrating your application up from the world of Zend Framework version 1.x.

Although I'm not posting here much at the moment, I am answering questions about my Zend Framework book in Manning's Author Online forums. [...] Also, I have started posting up the errata that we have found on the book's website. If something doesn't make sense, check there first!

Those forums are quite a busy place with topics about specific parts of chapters to more general Zend Framework questions.

For the last few days I've been reading the MEAP release of Zend Framework in Action from Rob Allen and Nick Lo published by Manning Publications and as a pre-review I'd like to share my reading experience. Currently there are 6 of totally 16 intended chapters available, to find out if them are already worth the money you might want to read further.

He describes to book, talking about some of the contents (of the parts he's read) including the intro to the framework, a closer look at the MVC architecture, Ajax integration, a close look at the model structure and some authentication functionality.

Today we are going to do something a little different. I've got books stacking up here that need reviewing, so I'm going to start interjecting book reviews into the podcast stream. [...] This week's book is "PHP in Action" by Manning Publications.

You can grab the mp3 of the podcast directly from the site or you can add the podcast's feed to your aggregator of choice and get this and other great episodes.

Chapter 1 is available for you to download and see where we are heading with the book. [...] In order to set expectations, I should probably point out that Zend Framework in Action is a tutorial book intended to show how to use the components of the framework together within "real world" projects.

Each component is dealt with in a "what is it?", "why use it?", "how do you use it?", "let's use it in the real world" manner. It's not an advanced exposition of each component as that would take many books!

Looks like a Great job done by Rob and Nick Lo so far - check out the first chapter and see what you think.

My buddy Olivia over at Manning Publications sent us a present recently. They are working on the title PHP in Action and they sent us a chapter to share with you. PHP in Action is scheduled to release in April of this year but it's available now in "Manning Early Release Program", or MEAP. MEAP is a cool program that allows you to buy the book long before it is released and have access to the chapters as they are released. Then, when the final dead-tree edition ships, they will send you one. The great thing is, there is no additional cost for MEAP.

He links to the book's description on the Manning site and gives some credit to the authors, Dagfinn Reiersol with Marcus Baker and Chris Shiflett. And, of course, the link to the sample chapter from the book - a look at Design Patterns.