Well done and best of luck with your project. The CakePHP community is lucky to have someone like you who finally decides to come up with some decent docs about Cake.

I liked this bit in particular:

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"This guide does not represent the practices, ideas, or conventions of the CakePHP Software Foundation and is not an official publication of the CakePHP community at large."
---

^^^*Please* keep it that way, for your own sake and sanity. Just a friendly advice ;)

Sorry, why would the Cake Foundation care besides them getting a cut? All this seems counter to PHP itself.

You're actually helping to promote cake ;) So it's bonus for the "Foundation" and the cake community. Heck, I'd buy it if it's better the so called manual. I rather be ruffling through your book than searching the newsgroup or even worst hunting down the actual cake code.

Anyway, good luck with the book.

Very nice introduction. I wish I had this back in summer of 2006 when I started my baking.

In the "Typical problems" section I'd recommend dialing up the visibility of restarting apache. I'm definitely a moron sometimes but in my first two Cake installations I went through the entire process and couldn't get the application to load the stylesheet. I even explored the issue on the Cake IRC channel. My problem was that I hadn't restarted Apache. It seems obvious but for someone who doesn't spend a great deal of time in my terminal app or making changes to my Apache configuration this "obvious" solution took a few hours to figure out.

I'd just set it off in one of your grey boxes "Don't forget to restart Apache" and I'm sure you'll at least save me some time the next time I do a Cake install.

Also to follow up on Brian's comment, my default XAMPP install had mod_rewrite commented out in httpd.conf. I had to uncomment that to get the app to load the stylesheet.

You might not be knowing but your this sample chapter is going to make life lot more easier for newbies.. really impressed by reading it.. I am soon going to implement the mentioned stuff.

I am definitely looking forward to the whole book..

All the best and yes, good work.. very good work..

Regards,
Deep

[...] great resource to get off the ground is David Golding’s The Newbie’s Introduction to CakePHP. He does a nice job showing you how to set up CakePHP locally on your computer using either MAMP or [...]

This is great. Really great. When is it likely to be completed, or may available for review?

Cheers, Pete

Is this available now? :) would really like to purchase it soon! Total newbie on cake here. Big problems on HABTM!

[...] is really welcome and I’m looking forward to get a copy of it. You can grab a couple of sample chapters at the author’s site. This entry was written by Niccolo Favari, posted on March 2, 2008 [...]

I just want to thank you for this great help, that was really helpful, please keep up the good work.

It there a release date? When will it be out?

@ Simon

The release date is set for July 21st.

http://apress.com/book/view/9781430209775

Hi David,

I'm considering to order your Book. Is there a way I can see the table of content? Thanks ++.

@Moulouk

I've posted the table of contents:

http://www.davidgolding.net/cakephp/beginning-cakephp-from-novice-to-professional/table-of-contents.html

Thanks David. I want ahead and pre-ordered. Can't wait to have it in my hands.

Errata? On page 62 "Listing 5-4 may need some explaining..." Should it be "Listing 5-5 may need..." instead?

Hi David, On page 65, when I followed the instruction in the book of the cake baking process. It asks "Would you like this console to use other model beside "post" Y/N? I select NO, I just wanted to let you know that particular step is not in the book. I'm on Ubuntu 8.04 but again I selected NO anyway, is it ok for that?
Please let me know as I follow through the whole book.
Thanks again,
Justin

@Justin

Please use the Forum to post questions like yours, it's a little easier for everyone to see both your question and any solutions.

What version of Cake are you using? There have been some changes since the book published in RC2 that have made simple things like Baking slightly different. You'll be fine selecting Y on that prompt from Bake. Either way, it shouldn't affect the tutorial that much.

Hello David,

Enjoying a free chapter, but I just would like to know why you did use the php short tags?.
This practice is not recommended in Cakephp coding standards [1] , also in widespread guidelines like Pear Coding Standard [2].

[1] https://trac.cakephp.org/wiki/Developement/CodingStandards#PHPtags

[2] http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.tags.php

Regards,

I know HTML and CSS and I've been using PHP at a beginner level for a few years - just "drop through" code embedded within the html mainly.

I installed CakePHP easily and I get the concept of the MVC. But I'm having trouble getting my head around the whole "object oriented" side of things. Does your book explain how to use Cake in such a way that I would get? Or do I have some other leaning to do first?

I don't get what all this "This" business is about. For ex. $this->set('posts', $this->Post->find('all'));
makes no sense to me at all!!

I just read the sample chapter - and it looks like I should have no trouble. Your explanations are very clear. I ran through the todo list setup without a hitch. Thanks - looking forward to getting your book!