by: Kai Chan and John Omokore with Richard K. Miller
First off, thank you for picking up this book. Whether you are standing in a bookshop or reading this at home, we assume you probably have a strong interest in developing web sites.
In the past few years, the number of web site frameworks has increased dramatically. This is especially true for PHP-based frameworks. Many people have chosen to adopt CakePHP (Cake, for short) for various reasons, such as these:

• PHP Programmers are widely available. Most project have tight deadlines, and you want team members who can quickly pick up a new piece of technology.
• Cake PHP is easy to learn. You want a powerful tool taht you can easily master.
• Cake PHP has good support. Developers frequently post and reply to message on the Cake forum. And there are always some good discussions happening on the Cake IRC. (To see for yourself, simply download mIRC from, connect to  the server, and join the channel.)

When you are developing a site using Cake, you often find yourself trawling through tutorials online to see how things are done. We’ve done that ourselves many times. However, despite the power of the Internet, we still like to look through books. And we think you will find this book a great help in your Cake development endeavors, in addition to all of the material available online.
Most of the applications in this book have been written as a result of some real-world development we have done in the past. We focus on projects that we think are relevant to the future of web development.
Let’s take mashups, for example. We should all take an interest in this ever-expanding area of web development. We can honestly say that any successful online web site in the future will need to easily communicate with other applications. Application designers will need to bear this in mind. Matters such as search engine optimization need to be built into the application itself. Cake allows us to think in terms of the high-level architecture instead of the nuts and bolts of a web application.