Preface

The main idea behind FuelPHP Application Development Blueprints is to teach you FuelPHP's basic and advanced features by building various projects of increasing levels of complexity. It is very result-oriented; at the beginning of the chapters, we specify the application we want to build, and then we progressively implement it by learning how to use new FuelPHP features along the way. Our approach will therefore be very practical; a lot of concepts will be explained using code examples, or by integrating them directly into our projects. Thus, it is important to highlight that there will be a lot of code and you should be comfortable with reading and understanding PHP and HTML. As we will use them from time to time, having some knowledge about server/system administration and some foundation in JavaScript, jQuery, and CSS will be an added advantage.

Though this book is for intermediary to advanced web developers, any prior knowledge of the FuelPHP framework, or any other PHP framework, is not required. In order to understand this book, you don't have to know common concepts such as MVC, HMVC, or ORM. We take into account this shortcoming some of you might have, and important notions will be explained. We won't explain all of those in the first chapter though, as we want this to be as painless as possible; we will instead approach them when they become necessary for the project completion.

The ultimate purpose of FuelPHP Application Development Blueprints is to give you the ability to build any project using FuelPHP. By the end of this book, you certainly won't know every little detail of the framework, but you will hopefully have the necessary toolbox required to implement complex and maintainable projects.