Chapter 1, The Symfony Framework – Installation and Configuration, gives a quick overview of Symfony's history, ways to install and configure it, and ways to use the composer—the dependency manager used within Symfony2.

Chapter 2, Your First Pages, gives you a quick walkthrough over the basic MVC features available in most solutions nowadays. It will demonstrate to you how to create simple controllers and first views, prepare entities, and load sample data.

Chapter 3, Twig Templating and Assets Handling, shows you in details how to handle views, assets managements, and add a frontend library.

Chapter 4, Forms, focuses on form creation. It will show you how to create form types, validate forms, and write data to databases.

Chapter 5, Security and Handling Users, gives you information about Symfony security features. In this chapter, we will create an example of registration and login forms, and how to handle users with the help of an open source bundle.

Chapter 6, Translation, gives information about translation and internalization. You will learn how to create translation files, translate various areas of your application, and choose a good translation strategy.

Chapter 7, AJAX, teaches you how to handle basic AJAX calls. We will also learn about bundles that are useful when you write RESTful applications, how to handle various HTTP methods, and how to serialize data in a JSON structure.

Chapter 8, Command-line Operations, will provide you with examples on how to create a command-line task, which is often useful with tasks executed in background (cron tasks). You will also learn how to send an e-mail through swiftmailer—a component used by default within the Symfony framework to handle e-mail sending.

Chapter 9, Symfony2 Profiler and Debugger, is where you will learn about the Web Debug Toolbar and profiler. We will examine the possibilities offered by these tools and write some code to demonstrate debugging and profiling features.

Chapter 10, Preparing an Application for Production, will give you an overview of the tasks that are usually done when your project needs to be deployed. You will also get an overview of various deployment strategies, and you will be able to check your framework and bundles against known security issues.

You will need a minimum of a PHP 5.4 installation with standard extensions such as database, intl, mcrypt, posix, or pcntl. It is also recommended for this book to use a Unix/Linux system such as Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, FreeBSD, or Mac OS X.

This book is aimed at experienced programmers, especially those familiar with a closely related technology such as Yii or Laravel but who now want to learn Symfony quickly.

This book will also prove beneficial for experienced PHP developers who want to explore and evaluate new frameworks and their possibilities in day-to-day tasks.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Your own bundles are usually stored within the src/ directory, while the third-party bundles sit within the vendor/ directory."

A block of code is set as follows:

public function indexAction()
    {
        return $this->render('default/index.html.twig');
    }

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

use AppBundle\Entity\Task;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
$ sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "You should see a Hello anonymous! welcome text."

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