Thanks for all the suggestions and the discussion. I've been using ZF for probably over a year now, if not longer. But it's been so on/off that I might miss a few big releases and then I find some big changes.
For example, I started using and practicing with ZF before Zend_layout. I bought some early books on it. Followed along. Did tutorials. Had no problems, even as I learned about MVC, which conceptually is easy to understand. Then, I stopped for a bit, Zend_Layout came out, and everything was changed. I started over learning Zend_Layout, stopped... and Zend_Form comes out. I spent time learning that, rinse repeat. The problem is I tend to keep hitting brick walls. I'm trying to learn something like using Zend_Navigation. Being a programmer by degree, I'm fine using the API. But even the API doesn't tell me everything because I'm looking through the Zend_Navigation code and I realize it's not the Navigation class, it's a View Helper. It gets to the point that I start reading the source code. For something like the Header Title element. The API doesn't state you can "APPEND, PREPEND, or SET" as your three options. I had to pop open the source to figure that out. It gets royally confusing until you actually get such a big foundation of knowledge built up on ZF that it becomes more second hand. On top of that, there's "best practices" that come with MVC that's outside of understanding what MVC is and how it works. Should this code be put into a Model class? Or is it part of the View? Those kind of questions. Perhaps this Survive the Deepend online book is what I've been looking for. It certainly sounds exactly what I'm feeling. I really want to learn ZF inside-out and even start writing my own tutorials at some point, when I get that good, but right now I'm getting frustrated trying to find a guided course to just transition some simple sites I have now into ZF. I think ZF has tons of potential and it does have a lot of reference material, but I feel there's a lot left out. As someone else said, a bit passive aggressive. It's to the point that I feel like just going back to doing my own thing for a framework because it takes so long to put things together. Cheers for the suggestions, though! -- View this message in context: http://n4.nabble.com/ZF-Where-to-begin-tp787666p787846.html Sent from the Zend Framework mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
