Monday, March 23, 2009

CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development

CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development
Paperback: 220 pages
Publisher: Packt Publishing (July 23, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1847191746
ISBN-13: 978-1847191748
Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 0.7 inches







CodeIgniter (CI) is a powerful open-source PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. CodeIgniter is an MVC framework, similar in some ways to the Rails framework for Ruby, and is designed to enable, not overwhelm.

This book explains how to work with CodeIgniter in a clear logical way. It is not a detailed guide to the syntax of CodeIgniter, but makes an ideal complement to the existing online CodeIgniter user guide, helping you grasp the bigger picture and bringing together many ideas to get your application development started as smoothly as possible.
  • Clear, structured tutorial on working with CodeIgniter
  • Careful explanation of the basic concepts of CodeIgniter and its MVC architecture
  • Using CodeIgniter with databases, HTML forms, files, images, sessions, and email
  • Building a dynamic website quickly and easily using CodeIgniter's prepared code

Improve your PHP coding productivity with this guide to the powerful and popular CodeIgniter framework.
  • Setting up the CI package on your web server
  • Understanding the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern for organizing a dynamic website
  • Understanding the structure of a CI site
  • Designing better views and controllers
  • Object-oriented aspects of CI
  • Integrating databases such as MySQL and simplifying your database access
  • Making your site more robust and professional by using CI's built-in classes
  • Creating and validating HTML forms with CI form helpers
  • Handling files, images, and sessions with CI
  • Sending email from CI
  • Using CI for testing your code with error handling, unit testing, benchmarking, and profiling
  • Getting an XML-RPC server and client working
  • Generating Create, Update, Delete, and Read (C.R.U.D) entries on each database table

This book steps you through the main features of CodeIgniter in a systematic way, explaining them clearly with illustrative code examples.

User Review:

When I first discovered CodeIgniter, I was overcome with glee after following the video tutorials. It all worked. There was no need to rely on any command-line interaction to "automagically" build my application for me. There was no dependence on PEAR or any other outside resources. There was just CodeIgniter. And it worked.

As soon as I got a grasp on what it was doing and why, I dove into the excellent User Guide and began to feel all warm and fuzzy inside. This felt like home. The user guide is written in such a non-intimidating manner that it invites even the most timid of PHP developers. To this day, I still refer to the user guide when I forget specific syntax or function names and it's a guick in-and-out routine. Nothing at all complex about it.

Not too long ago I came across a book by Packt Publishing called 'CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development'. At first, I thought to myself, "Why?". The combination of the user guide, the forum and CodeIgniter's well structured code is surely enough for anybody to learn, right? What could this book have that any potential developer could not obtain through these natural resources?

Throughout the fifteen chapters in the book, the author walks you through building a functional application from start to finish (well, at least as finished as any web application truly is). At first I thought the choice of the application to build was rather odd, but as I continued reading the book, I realized it was a good example because of the wide array of helpers, libraries and other standard CodeIgniter components and logic the application uses. Specifically, the example application provides a way to monitor several different aspects of remote websites by performing tests and generating reports. The author does a great job of walking the reader through the process step by step while explaining why and how the various CodeIgniter components are being used.

However, I did find the odd spelling error here and there and I don't necessarily agree with outputting HTML from a model, but overall this book is a great addition to the natural resources that the user guide and forum provide. This book will be of no help to the (albeit few) people that immediately jump into the forums asking "how do I..." without taking a little time to read through the user guide and searching pre-existent forum threads to find a solution for their problem, but for those who truly want to learn more about the framework and want to have a good book on hand, then this book certainly does the trick.


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