Intended Audience

This book is intended for web developers involved in the development of web-based applications in PHP. The author strives to start with simple things that a beginner should understand. Advanced things go last in a chapter. This makes this book the first book about Zend Framework that is easy to read and understand for a newbie. You do not need to be a guru in design patterns to understand most of the content.

To read and understand this book, you need to have a basic knowledge of PHP. A good point for learning PHP is its official website and the on-line documentation. It would be good if you have some understanding of HTTP requests, GET and POST variables, namespaces, classes and interfaces.

Because PHP is closely related to other web technologies, it is also recommended that you have some basic experience in the following:

• HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) -- used for creating web pages that can be displayed in a web browser.
• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) -- used for defining the look and feel of a web page, like font size or background color.
• JavaScript -- a client-side scripting language used for making a web page more interactive.

For learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript, a good starting point is W3Schools Tutorials.