This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 9 Ratings

This book adds lots of value - 2008-09-29
Reviewer Rating:
Although I generally tend to "lurk" and read reviews rather than write them, I felt compelled to write one for this Zend Studio for Eclipse book.

I am a professional PHP programmer, and have been a Zend Studio 5.x user for two years. I knew every nook and cranny of Zend Studio 5.x. I had only praise for the product.

When Zend released Zend Studio for Eclipse, I switched over to it. All of a sudden I felt incompetent. I literally couldn't figure out how to do anything, it was so different than what I had gotten used to in v5.x.

The Zend manuals didn't help, there was too much background about eclipse to know in order to do the most basic things. As good as eclipse is, it is not the most intuitive piece of software.

So, try as I did, I just couldn't get anything working with ZS4E, even with the Zend manuals.

Frustrated, I went back to 5.x, in the hope that the zend documentation would eventually improve. I spent several months back in the 5.x product when I decided I would once again try ZS4E, but this time with the help of this book.

Contrary to some of the reviews below, about the book not adding value beyond what is available in the Zend manuals, I strongly disagree.

Perhaps the topics the book covers are the same as what the manual covers, but the book fills in so much background you need to know, and walks you through tasks which you need to do, that it - in my opinion - adds lots of value.

Thanks to the book I have been working in ZS4E for several months now. I repeatedly refer back to the book, not the manuals, when I need to do something new.

So that's the positive. I definitely recommend the book. It is miles ahead of the what the manuals offer.

The only thing I could suggest as a future improvement is to add to the current content by covering more of the oodles of config and operational options available in ZS4E. While the book covers the most important 95% usage options, and the remaining 5% would probably double the size of the book, it would still be nice to have. At least in an appendix.

All in all though, I feel, definitely worth the money, because ZS4E is a much superior product once you get used to all the new stuff and new ways of doing something. This book really helps get you into all the new stuff in a way that a terse manual couldn't.

Thank you to the author and those responsible.

Book review: Zend Studio for Eclipse: Developer's Guide - 2008-12-29
Reviewer Rating:
Description
Zend Studio for Eclipse, Developer's Guide from Addison-Wesley Pearson Education is a guide to Zend Studio for Eclipse (ZSE) for intermediate to advanced developers.

The book has 18 chapters, with the first 16 covering the different views and preference settings for each specific task. The first 5 chapters are explaining basically the layout of the Eclipse working environment, with a focus on how to modify these views for your own benefit. The last 2 chapters are devoted to working out an example application using ZSE with Zend Framework.

Personal opinion
This book is in my opinion a beginner's guide into using ZSE, aiming at PHP developers that have a knowledge of general concepts like versioning, debugging and refactoring. I personally was hoping to see advanced settings to tune the IDE into a powerful developer's tool, but it was merely a basic explanation with the correct terminology for a product that I've been using well over two years now (yes, I was also beta-tester for it).

Conclusion
If you're new to Eclipse in general and specifically Zend Studio for Eclipse, I believe this book is going to be a valuable asset. It will not only give you insight in how the Eclipse IDE works, but it shows you also the possibilities to turn this into a very powerful tool for building PHP applications.

But if you're already a ZSE veteran I'd have to advice not to buy this book since it has no extra value then to explain the settings/views you've been using all along.

Usuitable for Any Skill Level - 2008-08-13
Reviewer Rating:
I cannot recommend this book to any target audience.

For experienced developers the book lacks any detailed information on how (for example) to get remote debugging working or to integrate any version control software. The sparse overviews provided have nothing you won't already know if you've ever used any IDE.

For beginners the book is rife with the kind of errors (the text does not agree with the sample code or images) that will drive them crazy.

The writing is clumsy and full of grammatical and spelling errors. The actual information doesn't go at all beyond what you can get by simply browsing the help files you got with Zend Studio for Eclipse.

Other than being able to read this away from the computer (not the most effective way to learn an IDE) there's no value to this book.

A very disappointing book - 2009-04-01
Reviewer Rating:
I'm new to PHP and new to Zend Studio, so I should be the perfect audience for this book. But its content is sooo thin, so lacking in any true help, that it deserves just one star. Zend Studio is a very broad product, it covers a lot of ground. You could easily imagine a 500 page book on it. But in this much thinner book, the authors briefly touch on the major topics saying at a very high level what they're for, telling you where to find it the menu and if there's a main dialog, showing a picture of that with a sketchy description of the main options. But they *don't* tell you anything that you can't easily find for yourself, they don't tell you how to get important project tasks done (pointing you to a dialog isn't sufficient), they don't cover any common troubleshooting. In short, they state what's right in front of your nose and leave it at that.

Get max from Zend Studio for Eclipse - 2008-08-31
Reviewer Rating:
Nice book, that helps me speed up PHP developing in Zend Studio for Eclipse.

Good introduction into Eclipse IDE and advanced PHP development topics like debugging or unit testing.

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