The last few week I’ve been working quite a lot with Symfony 2, it’s not the simplest of frameworks and for my next project I think I’ll try another framework – But thats another story. Here are some links and tips to help bail you out, when you inevitably get stuck.

Links

1. Symblog – This in my opinion is the best place to start learning Symfony 2. Dsyph3r – The author, has created a bunch of tutorials, to walk you through the process of creating a blog. Sadly the tutorials arn’t complete but the amount you can learn quick, makes this the ideal place to get going.
2. Symfony 2 Cheat Sheet – This is the biggest cheat sheet I’ve ever seen, but Symfony 2 is pretty huge. Here you will find tonnes of snipets to help you with your controllers, routing, Twig templating, Doctrine 2, unit and functional testing, forms & validation, security, caching, translations and the service container.
3. Symfony 2 Official Website – The amount of docs on this website are extreme, however I find it to boring to read through. However for some areas of Symfony 2, this is the only place you’tre going to get docs which actually make sense.
4. Symfony 2 API – Exactly what it says on the tin. This is useful, however I find it easier just looking through the Symfony 2 classes myself.

Tips

1. Get comfortable with the Symfony 2 codebase – Once you know the basics, if you know where to look, the code is your best form or documentation. If you use an IDE like Netbeans or Sublime with the SublimeCodeIntel plugin, you can alt-click on functions, methods, classes, variables etc and the IDE will take you to where that construct was created.
2. Developer toolbar – This is a pretty awesome feature of Symfony’s, look over it, it can really help you debug your code, recently in the logs section, Symfony have also added and highlighted calls to classes and methods which are going to be depreciated in later versions of Symfony, so make sure you look out for these.
   

Saying all of this, if you have a choice to use another framework, I would dabble in a few before you make any strong commitments. I found Symfony 1 to be awesome, but I’m not such a fan of Symfony 2.