New from the Web Developer's Virtual Library today is this overview by Marc Plotz of the Zend Framework, including a brief introduction to the Model/View/Controller design pattern.

Many developers are scared off by the thought of something as huge and confusing as the Zend Framework - I know this because I was once one of them. What I soon learned was that there is some pleasure in working with a framework that does most of the nauseating grind work for you. However, there is a trade off: you have to understand the somewhat pedantic nature of the code required along with the principles of the design pattern that is MVC (Model-View-Controller). Is it worth it? Let's take a look.

The article takes a very high level look at the framework mentioning the bootstrapping the framework does ("not only safe, it makes sense") and a look at one of the many components the framework comes with - Zend_Mail.