Extending Symfony2 Web Application Framework: Symfony2 took the great features of the original framework to new levels of extensibility. With this practical guide you'll learn how to make the most of Symfony2 through controlling your code and sharing it more widely.

Is a short and concise book with clear goals. There are some concepts that even I heard before, I thought they was complicate, but with this book I realized that they are very simple.You need to know about Symfony2 is not a beginner book and also you won't learn everything about Symfony2 is a book that teach you how you can create your bundles in a way that they could be reused in other applications and in they way of it, it explains functionalities that can be helpful even if that is not your intention.

This book is not for beginners, to understand and appreciate it you must have made at least one project with Symphony2.The book presents code examples mainly, very clear, that can be safely reused for your own projects.The ultimate goal of the book is to create and distribute your bundle, but each chapter can be considered separately, and each can help a lot to improve the way to implement functionality in Symfony2.I especially enjoyed the chapter on Commands and how to set them as an interface to Services, because, as written by the author, opening a terminal is already a technical operation for many people, and having a web interface for starting the process that the site admins could use is very powerful.The other chapters that I liked were the one on Doctrine, on how to use with MongoDB and coordinates, and the one on Twig and how to implement a widget for a map.I recommend this book to anyone who wants to deepen and improve his knowledge of Symfony2, and who wants to better understand the logic.

I have been programming in PHP semi-professionally for 14 years now. I've done a few small and unpublished Symfony2 projects trying to learn it but never have felt like I was REALLY grasping it. I've found the Yii framework to be easier to use for someone who doesn't program every day as Yii is straight forward and you can dive right in with little refresher. Symfony has made me feel like I'm becoming a dinosaur in the programming world but at the same time I need to get caught up. I'm glad to say that this book is clear and concise (much more so than the Symfony book). It's very easy to follow along and has great examples that you can expand on. Within a few minutes of starting this book I could actually feel the cobwebs in my head clear and could grasp Symfony a whole lot easier. I can see myself jumping into Symfony projects just as easily as Yii and with the extra power and resources that Symfony has. If you are a seasoned PHP developer but having a difficult time grasping Symfony, this book will help you immensely. Thanks to everyone who made this book possible.

I've been using symfony2 since its release on numerous projects and I recently read through this book.If you are a beginner or just starting out with symfony2, I suggest you spend your time reading the documentation on symfony.com and working on some test projects first. This book is not beginner friendly and assumes you have a working knowledge of symfony2, some of the explanations are skipped over quickly which is great for the intended audience of the book, as you spend more time of more advanced uses of the framework.If you are an intermediate or more advanced user of symfony2, I am sure you will learn something by reading this book and it is well worth your time. Most books are very general, this book gives some real-world usage tips that you can use in your projects right now.This book has useful information that will

Extending Symnfony by Sébastien Armand is a tutorial-style introduction to a variety of the ways that you can extend a Symfony 2 full stack installation. I’m a big fan of Symfony 2 and I’ve done a fair amount of app building with it, so I was interested in Armand’s book and seeing what new things I could discover about hooking into sf2.The book is filled with code samples, far more than you’ll find in most other technical books. Most of these code samples are also complete, which anyone who has traversed the official Symfony 2 cookbooks will greatly appreciate. Unfortunately, these code samples sometimes cross pages in inconvenient ways, and none of them include syntax highlighting which can make it hard to read at times.Armand tackles six (sort of eight) areas of Symfony 2 development where developers can tap in and extend existing functionality of Symfony 2. First and foremost he kicks off his tutorials with covering service definitions and listeners. These topics seem like they could have been separate chapters to me, but nonetheless he does a good job of giving real world examples of how to tie these things in. He especially does well with event listeners - the secret weapon of the Symfony 2 stack (in my opinion anyhow).Armand’s approach to extending symfony is project-based, meaning that through the book you’re working on building an app that handles some details for meet ups between users. You can think of it like the old Symfony 1 Askeet tutorial. This is a huge advantage of Armand’s book over other Symfony 2 texts you’ll find in the wild. Actual applications create context and drive home the concepts. As an added bonus, in this book you are NOT building yet another task manager!The Security chapter covers some of the more difficult areas of Symfony 2. Anyone who has dealt with Security in sf2 knows that, while extremely powerful, it can also be extremely challenging. Armand’s examples are helpful, especially as he tackles an OAuth implementation. Armand uses the Friends of Symfony UserBundle to get going, but unfortunately didn’t cover with too much depth getting started with this super handy bundle. The examples in the book are priceless, but I look forward to future revisions that cover the new SimpleAuth implementation in Symfony 2. The only other thing I wished Armand would have covered was securing an api with tokens and a custom user provider for doing this. He shows how a cookie can be used with an event listener, but truthfully there are better ways of tackling this problem in Symfony 2 that are more consistent with its security model.One of the most valuable chapters in this book is the Doctrine chapter. Doctrine 2’s official documentation lacks a lot of context. By being a project-based tutorial, Armand actually shows you how to write a custom data type, custom DQL function, and a custom filter, rather than stumble through the Doctrine 2 docs and hope you got close. This chapter in and of itself is a valuable resource for those times when you need to do these things.The final chapter discusses bundles briefly. This is one area of the book I felt could have been fleshed out a bit more. Armand covers the basics, but part of me felt like this chapter almost belonged at the beginning of the book instead of the tail end. The other thing that was missing from this chapter was bundle inheritance which, while a tricky subject, is a huge part of extending a Symfony 2 application.All in all I think this is a solid book on tapping into some of the more powerful features of Symfony 2 and it’s counterpart Doctrine 2. The book is at times a little oddly organized, but the code samples and tip are worthy any web developers time. If you’re looking to dive into some of the things in the book’s table of contents get yourself a copy and profit from Armand’s tutorials and extensive code samples.