PHPArch Zend Framework Course Review

[Aaron Cooper]

Hi All,

 

I have just completed the 19 hour Zend Framework Course with PHP Architect in Canada. I thought I'd write and post a review for future reference.

 

Overview

Cost: $899.97 USD

URL: http://www.phparch.com/c/training/course/phpzf

 

The course is a basic introduction to the Zend Framework and several of the core libraries and development methodolgies that form a foundation for creating applications mainly through the MVC framework, but also touching on standalone includes of library files on an as-need basis.

 

Course Structure

The PHP Arch courses are online, instructor led courses of small numbers of students. The Tutor runs slides of training materials, while discussing points in live audio. Students interact with the instructor by way of an integrated chat channel, although the instructor has the ability to open audio for more complex questions. The tutor runs through the content in blocks, then gives exercises to complete during course time, while the instructor is on hand to give aid where nessecary. Students are also assign homework for further expansion or study. This is not compulsary, but it's your money.

 

Course sessions run in 3 hour blocks, and mine were reasonably timed to start at 8am NZDT, although this varies, as my ZCE course had me starting at 4am.

 

Tutor

Paul Reinheimer is a well respected PHP proffesional, WROX Author and PHP Doc Team contributer. This is the second course I have done with Paul, the first being Zend Cert Prep. Paul's knowledge of the internals of PHP is at times encyclopedic. He has a laid back and humouros manner, and seems to enjoy sharing his vast knowledge with students, along with the odd joke to keep the course discussion relaxed.

 

Student Level

At the time of starting the course, I had started developing my first Zend Framework application, read part of the docs, and read through several tutorials. So my level with ZF would be classed as Beginner, although not complete noob.

 

Course Review

As I had already done some self-paced study and work with the Framework, many of the topics, examples and exercises were quite familiar to me. Although these same topics would be foundational to any developer who had little to no exposure to the Framework. But even though I had covered and understood these basics, there were still aspects of this early content that I had either missed, or were the sort of things only realized by experience with the Framework.

 

As the course got past it's first 2 days, largely covering setup, the MVC pattern, and data access - I found that the material advanced to libraries I had not yet touched on, or if I had, I had done so less than optimally. An example of this was found in the Zend_Auth library where I required a way to not only use the framework to securely validate and authorize a user, but also check if that user is currently active. Although I had found a way of doing this myself, Paul's explaination of custom Auth adapters showed me that refactoring was in order.

 

Further on, we looked at topics such as profiling database queries, Authentication using Zend_ACL, the framework's own form handling library, view helpers and built-in services (such as Flickr/GData). All of these are topics I had not yet looked at myself in detail, so the final sections of the course proved to be highly educational.

 

The most informative part of the course was the final topic, which centered around Zend_Cache and performance of ZF appications. This section of the course not only covered ZF's built in library (for caching everything from database result sets to complete classes to entire pages) but also covered generic perfomance concepts using APC and memcache plus broken down statistics of a sample application at each stage of an optimization process.

 

Overall Course Conclusion

It was obvious that Paul is not a "guru" with Zend Framework, and he even seemed to discover a few little tidbits himself during the course of interacting with his students. However this general perception may have more than a little to do with my past experience with him as a raw PHP tutor, where his ability to answer even the most detailed of questions on the language and underlying structure was quite incredible. ZF is also a huge library of classes. It would be a little unfair to expect even the best PHP tutor having a like-wise intimate knowledge of such a framework.

 

It is also worth noting that this is a reletively new offering from PHP Arch. I obtained a fantastic foundation in the framework in 6 days and picked up some advanced aspects of ZF that I was having trouble with getting my head around in the docs. It was here that ability to have an experienced user to bounce questions off in real time really paid off. Paul asked for feedback on the course, and it appears that he is very interested in evolving his material based on student feedback, which can only be a good thing for future students.

 

Paul's teaching style is a core reason why I went back to PHP Arch. He has a great ascending style to his material, unfaultering speech, and is very attentive on his students, often stopping mid sentence or moving back a slide if he sees someone typing in the chat channel. It is evident in my two courses under him that he is not just presenting information, but he wants people to understand the content, and understand it well. To this end, he succeeds.

 

The Zend Framework course would be particulary suited to an Intermediate PHP developer with little to no knowledge with ZF. I found myself thinking that perhaps I should have stuck with the tutorials and docs for the first 2 days, but that was quickly dispelled from day 3 onwards as we got into the meatier stuff. However, if a developer with some decent commercial experience in ZF asked me, I'd probably have to tell them it would be a little too basic for them. Although I had taught myself some aspects of the framework, this mainly centered around MVC, Zend_DB and Zend_Auth - and even then, the going was much slower than what I would have picked up in the course.

 

Any questions, let me know.

 

Cheers

Aaron