A Year With Symfony - End Of Life

Matthias Noback

TLDR;

  • I won’t update A Year With Symfony anymore.
  • The e-book is now freely available.

My first book, A Year With Symfony, was well received when I first published it on September 4th. At the time it seemed to be a welcome addition to the official Symfony documentation.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. Several new Symfony components were released and we have now arrived at the next major version, 3.0. In the meantime I published one update of the book: a new chapter about Annotations.

One year after the initial release I announced some big plans for a partial rewrite and a new chapter. I started working, but never finished it.

The content of the book is not outdated yet, not even after the arrival of a new major Symfony version. Most of the code samples still work. Only some parts of “quoted” Symfony code has been changed in the meantime.

If I were to write this book today, it would be different in several ways. I wouldn’t focus so much on reusability in the final chapter. I would still write about separating “library code” from “framework glue code”. But I would also promote the use of everything that Symfony has to offer in terms of Developer eXperience. If part of your codebase lives close the the framework, I’d advise you to “fully embrace the framework” in that code.

Finally, I would remove the “Project structure” chapter and replace it with something about application architecture. This is a topic about which I’ve learned a lot since writing this book. What’s in the “Project structure” chapter is mostly a mistake (at least the part about form handlers). The sections on request and context data and passing it along instead of injecting it is still very important to be aware of.

Because of my current more or less full-time job at Ibuildings I don’t see any options for a big update/rewrite. By writing this post I want to make it clear that I won’t be changing, adding to or updating A Year With Symfony anymore. You could say it is “End of Life”. However, the book has proven to be valuable for many people (about 2000 books have been sold so far!), so I still want to offer it to potential readers. From now on you can download it for free! The printed edition is still available on Amazon for the usual price.

Thanks for your ongoing support! This was a great adventure, an interesting experience and I’ve learned a lot!