A new book about CodeIgniter from Packt Publishing

The CodeIgniter community is still thriving, despite the recent events at EllisLab (http://ellislab.com/blog/entry/ellislab-seeking-new-owner-for-codeigniter). A 3.0 version is in the works down at GitHub and a new book was just published this September by Packt Publishing.

“Programming with CodeIgniter MVC” is written by Eli Orr – a programmer with 30+ years of experience in the high tech industry under his belt and who is presently a high level PHP developer, focusing on projects involving the CodeIgniter framework – and Yehuda Zadik – with 20+ years experience in the IT industry and 8 years worth of Object-Oriented Programming in PHP.

It takes some courage to write a book on CodeIgniter if we consider the last serious one that came out was about the 1.7version, but a statement needed to be done… This framework still has some juice in it.

This is the kind of book I needed when I first got into CodeIgniter. Sadly, at the time 2.1 rolled in, the web development community was still trying to get used to 1.7, so tutorials for newcomers to the new version of this framework were scarce.

Right now, Laravel gets all the buzz. Despite that, we still need frameworks that are fast, easy to grasp, and that lead us to expected results.

Here is where CodeIgniter comes in. Book in hand, having an easy to learn framework with decent requirements and great performance, you can soon say that you know without a doubt what a framework is and how it works.

Even if you supposedly need “some OOP knowledge” to read it, I can tell you that a PHP programmer that’s only on the procedural programming level can easily pick it up.

Starting from the famous “Hello World”, the book delves into the Model-View-Controller mindset and guides you through framework-specific code with a lot of examples.

The authors could have stopped at covering the basics, which can also be found on the internet, for the most part. Instead, they chose to give tangible examples. So, beyond sending e-mail with attachments and designing a login, the book treats popular APIs like Google Maps, Flickr, LinkedIn and Facebook, helping you to understand how to integrate the social aspect in your professional Apps.

I would have wanted the book to talk about HMVC (Hierarchical Model View Controller), which enables modular development in CodeIgniter, but I am pleased that it touches ORM. Hopefully these are the kind of subjects that can be approched in a next book written by Eli Orr and Yehuda Zadik, their style being practical and accessible.

Taking all this into account, this book is useful not only to the CodeIgniter community (a very helpful bunch), but also to those that are diving for the first time in the pool of PHP frameworks, or to those that are looking to migrate to a reliable and straightforward framework.

You can get this book from the Packt Publishing website.