Rob Allen's DevNotes

I use Twitter's search feature to create RSS feeds for useful terms, like "Zend Framework". Today I noticed a tweet from ManningBooks, my publisher for Zend Framework in Action!

It turns out that they've put up a sample of the book on Scribed! Check out the book, then order it, remembering to use the coupon code scribd25...

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. There's a fairly active discussion going on as readers find areas that they are struggling with and I do my best to contribute to most of the threads when I can.

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!

I'm not sure how many people follow my the Zend Framework in Action website yet, so I thought I'd advertise here that I've just posted about my upcoming session at the UK PHP Conference.

Go and read it and then subscribe to the RSS feed!

I thought I'd start a new website to talk about all things Zend Framework, so I'm introducing www.zendframeworkbook.com to the world.

The intention is to highlight interesting things that I see on the Zend Framework mailing lists and also to talk about book stuff periodically as well.

Obviously, if you follow the ZF mailing lists religiously, then you may find that you recognise the content of a lot of the posts, but if not, then it may turn into a useful summary of some of the main issues that are happening in Zend Framework land.

Now that it's been announced by Manning, I think I can talk a little more about the project that's been taking up most of my spare time!

Zend Framework in Action is a collaboration between myself and Nick Lo. We are still writing, but Chapter 1 is available for you to download and see where we are heading with the book. Manning has an early access program where you can get access to pre-production PDFs of each chapter if you can't wait. As a bonus for signing up early, you get to tell us what's wrong (and what's right!) before the prose is committed to the printed page so we can fix it and you'll get a better final 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!

So far, I've learnt that writing a book is considerably different (and much harder!) than writing a tutorial. Having help from the excellent people at Manning has eased the transition from writing when I feel like it to sitting down and writing daily. I still need to work out how to write good quality prose at a decent pace though!