also, to be honest i can’t imagine these guys lying about much… they’re talented people and seem to have integrity.

your turn…

I’m sorry to hear that you have experienced roadblocks. I do believe your situation is not typical however as I’ve had a great deal of success with symfony both within WireLoad and outside of it. As with every software project, there’s going to be a time when you have to go off the beaten path and figure things out that haven’t been fully documented or developed yet, but none the less, every key feature that is needed for a modern web application is right there and easy to use in symfony.

I hope that whatever ails your software project can be cleared up on time. Good luck.

The fact that it doesn’t offer any example application tutorials is fine as it encourages you to get involved with the online community to seek examples, ask questions and learn more. No doubt subsequent books on the symfony framework will offer complete application tutorials and walk-throughs.

You summed it up well with:

“The book can be used both as a primer and as a reference for a person who is not yet a symfony expert”.

Rob Ganly

Thank you for the kind review. As the book’s editor, and Apress’ Open Source Editorial Director, I wanted to offer some thoughts regarding our sale of the e-book despite it also being available under the GFDL. As you might imagine, both the authors and Apress poured considerable time and resources into the book, and clearly note the book’s availability under the GFDL. Accordingly, should readers be interested in supporting future works of this nature, we invite them to purchase either the print or electronic version (or both). There’s certainly nothing odd about it; it’s just another way to support both authors and publishers who choose to license their work under open source licenses.

Hope this helps to clarify our intentions.

Thank you,
Jason

Regarding the Generators chapter: I was repeatedly finding myself taking the default table based scaffolding and rewriting it to use labels and divs. So when I came into the Generators chapter I was hopeful to find some way to make this change once and for all. But I certainly understand that space is limited. Ironically enough I had a longer explanation about the Generators bit in a first draft of the review, and I cut it out to keep the review below 1,000 words.

Either way, thank you for a well written and easy to read book! I do wish more technical authors were as down to Earth as you and Mr. Potencier.

The scaffolding customization wasn’t developed at all in the book because when you start needing a custom theme, you’re not in the process of building a scaffolding (i.e. something that will serve as a base for future adaptations), but rather making a new generator. We explained how to develop a custom generator at the end of the chapter, and we hoped that it could help people like you, who need to use the provided classes for purposes that we didn’t plan in the first place, to customize and reuse them. But you’re right on saying that there’s never enough documentation; unfortunately we had to make choices about what had to be in the book and what had to be left aside – the number of pages is not unlimited. With more than 30 pages dedicated to the admin generator, there was not much room left to the scaffolding…

About the bugs in the source code, be assured that we tested all the examples provided. But despite the numerous rereadings (and maybe because of it), there are always typos left in the final book. That’s also one of the greatest advantages of having the book available online for free: we can keep on correcting it even after the paper book release, and provide an accurate and up-to-date documentation. If the book sells well, be assured that the second edition will correct all the bugs we’ve spotted so far.

One last remark: I was the one writing the snipeet application, but I know that people often see Fabien and I as the same person…

Thanks again for your comments, and welcome to the symfony community!