When I started to read the book 'Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer's Guide' by Peter MacIntyre and Ian Morse, I was particularly interested in those type of features. And luckily it contained many of these. One such example is the 'Working Sets' feature that's available from the Window menu in Zend Studio for Eclipse. It allows you to define a set of files within a project that you want to work on. Especially in large projects, this can be a time saver. Instead of navigating all the way across a huge project, you have all the files you need directly accessible through a neat small Working Set. Ironically, when trying this out on my project, I could not get it to work. I was able to select the working set I created, but nothing happened. But beside this little issue that's not the book's fault, it is fun to read about these not-so-obvious-but-very-handy features.

The book is a quick read. It is only 172 pages, contains a lot of screenshots, and is written in a very accessible way. It's written in such a way that it is easy to read about a feature and then immediately try it.

The book also has a few weak points. One that I particularly didn't like was the fact that many of the code examples are badly written. They don't follow best practices, and in some cases the book even contains PHP4 code snippets, which is odd, given that the book was published in 2008 (well after PHP4's End of Life announcement).

Another one is that for many features, the book starts by explaining the preferences screen. While not familiar with a feature, it's not really useful to first read about all the options that you can tweak before you read about the actual feature. I would've put those at the end of the chapters: first learn to work with the basics, then go ahead and tune the feature. Finally, it would be nice if the authors had given an overview of the differences between Zend Studio for Eclipse and the free PDT open source project that Zend Studio is based on. Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, wrote the foreword in which he talks almost exclusively about PDT, suggesting that Mike either didn't know the difference, or thought the book was about PDT.

Considering however the overall usefulness of the book in learning the details of the Zend Studio environment, I'm willing to look beyond those weak points, and recommend the book to those that develop in Zend Studio for Eclipse on a regular basis. Since the book also covers all the basics such as debugging, using SVN etc., it will also appeal to the novice Zend Studio for Eclipse user, and those that have moved from the classic Zend Studio 5 environment to Zend Studio for Eclipse but still need to find their feet.