If there is one adjective to describe this book, it would be that it is very informative. This is a perfect companion for when you are a ZF2 developer that is starting to develop your first app. I wish this was available to me when I just started on mine. This would save you a lot of time trying to figure out how things work and how to implement solutions to common problems (routing, navigation, authentication, etc) and let you focus on business requirements that are specific to your project.

This book covers a lot of ground, which is what you could hope for from a cookbook. The ZF2 team and contributors has done a great job with the official documentation, and this book is a great supplement to it. What makes this a good addition to the official docs is the fact that each recipe uses more than one Zend components to build out a solution. The official docs helped me see how each component can be used by themselves, but this cookbook gives concrete examples on how they can be used in conjunction with others as a part of a bigger picture. This cookbook reveals one of ZF2’s biggest strength which is its modularity and shows you ways how to wield it.

A little disclaimer that you might wish to consider before purchasing: as the title suggests, this is a cookbook. Just like how culinary cookbooks doesn’t really teach you how to cook, this book doesn’t teach you how to develop with Zend Framework 2. However it provides a good collection of solutions — “recipes” if you will — which solves a specific problem, from big to small. As such, a modicum amount of knowledge and experience with Zend Framework 2 is assumed from the reader and is required to understand and reap what this book has to offer.

You can purchase this book here.