If you are looking for a Zend Framework (ZF) book and don’t want to spend money then you should check out this new free ZF book called “Zend Framework: Surviving the Deep End” by Pádraic Brady. The book is free distributed in PDF and HTML formats under creative commons at http://www.survivethedeepend.com/. As of today there are only two chapters, the Introduction and The Architecture of Zend Framework Applications.

Chapter one is pretty much an overview of frameworks including Zend Framework and 13 bullet points why you should consider Zend Framework. Very informative and the bullets get right to the point. Some minor tweaking and this chapter could possibly be a pretty good white paper for customers thinking about deploying ZF.

Chapter two get down to the nitty-gritty of frameworks and a little bit of history behind design patterns. A topic that can be very confusing and controversial between developers. Chapter two ends with a quick overview of the Model-View-Controller design pattern in which ZF uses.

Overall the two chapters were very informative.  I am looking forward to the rest of the chapters, including the full chapter about Models in MVC and some in depth ZF Code.  I suggest if you are looking to learn more about Zend Framework you add this to your list of bookmarks as it will be growing regularly.