By: Jonathan Lebensold
Why aren’t you teaching me how to make a blogging / shopping cart application?
Because the Pragmatic Programmers did a fantastic job when they wrote their famous Rails book “Agile Web Development with Rails.” Crowds ooo-ed and aaa-ed when the rails camp wrote tutorials that described “how to make a blog in ten minutes using Rails.” PHPCake responded. They wrote a tutorial, and then people writing about Zend did the same thing.
When Stefan asked me to write about the Zend Framework, I decided I would avoid copy-able code, simply because it doesn’t re-enforce good software design. I’ve also read through many of these tutorials (most of which are excellent), however they tend to be misleading for several reasons:
- They don’t presume a complex view (with headers and footers that have dynamic logic)
- They don’t introduce core object libraries, but rather skim past them to get to the event-driven stuff (found in Zend_Controller, which I’ll cover soon)

