How to begin learning CakePHP or any other MVC framework

Question

I want to learn some MVC framework. I am trying to learn CakePHP by reading the docs on their website. But I am finding it very difficult to learn it.

Can someone suggest a good way to begin learning CakePHP and provide some alternative websites?

Answer 1

If you're anything like me, you will only learn so much from reading; it's important to have a project. Find something you want to actually build. Even if it's the ubiquitous blog application, it's something with a definitive set of requirements that are reasonably well known--at least to you. If you're an experienced enough as a developer, you should have a pretty decent idea of what you want to do and from there it's just a matter of determining the (Cake|Rails|Django|etc.) way of doing that particular thing. Take it one thing at a time and eventually everything will click.

Pick a framework with an active (and helpful community). Leverage the documentation and that community extensively to help you get over the learning curve. There will be a learning curve and you will get discouraged from time to time. If you can power through, you'll be better for it.

It's rather generic advice, I know, but it's a rather high level question. Hopefully it helps some.

Answer 2

Some pages that could give you a good start:

• Bakery Blog tutorial - a simple blog that covers the basic principles .. this one gives you a guided project
• IBM developerWorks tutorial 1 - as the next one this is a bit out of date but helped me a lot
• IBM developerWorks tutorial 2 - build a wiki
• my delicious cake bookmarks - well .. you might as well look it up there

Answer 3

tart doing something...only by practicing you will get something to know

try to do a blog, and you will use these techniques in every your project

Answer 4

Symfony's Askeet tutorial (now published as the "Practical symfony" book and still online for free) is designed to introduce the concepts and features in a hands-on way with "24 tutorials of 1 hour each". I would guess it would work to pick up many of the general MVC concepts too.

Answer 5

I started to learn CakePHP around 2 months ago, and then jumped (hit the ground running on a large Cake PHP project). The way I have found to learn Cake is to read EVERY (relevant) article around, as well as the 4 books in Print. Spefically I would read 'Cakephp Application development' first as that book seems to be best 'all-rounder'.