Thread

The wiki could be a great place to point to every single CI book that Igniters will find. Why not with reviews too?

@audiopleb: ok, I will post my own review here (or in the Wiki?) once I’ve read it, but it will take some time.

@Jemgames: this sounds promising, please keep us updated!

@Kami_: thanks for your opinion.

@Adam Griffiths: there’s nothing wrong with the user guide, of course, I think we all agree that CI’s user guide just plain rocks and is one of the big pro’s about CI. I use it all the time and it does exactly what you say, explaining in detail how every class and function works. But this doesn’t mean that there is no use for a book on CI. The packt book by David Upton for example has one chapter about the “CI Super-Object” (Chapter 7) which was quite interesting and gave some background info about the inner workings of CI, although it was maybe the only chapter in that book that went well beyond the user guide. I’ve built a few “minor” web apps in CI with basic CMS and comment functions and it worked very well using the user guide as my only reference, but I’m not very experienced in PHP either and I’ve never developed things like a shopping cart or a user authentication system and I like to learn by examples - and since I exclusively work with CI when I develop something with PHP, I would like to read a book covering advanced techniques with CI by example.

@Grahack: that seems a good idea, although I’m not sure what would be the best way to structure it - a new category “Books”, perhaps, with a new page for each book and then people post their reviews to the according page?

That’s what I had in mind indeed!

Ok, here’s the new Book Category of the Wiki. I created a page for the book Codeigniter for Rapid PHP Application Development . I put links to all reviews I could find on external sites and I’ll post my own review there later (I need to literally “re-view” the book before I post a review since it’s a few months ago that I’ve read it).

I also added a page for the book Professional CodeIgniter

Adding my 2cts after reading that book too:
There is good things inside, like taking a real life situation building an application or the Agile development part. But for me, it sound not like the author try to show how to make things with CI, but it seems like he try to show how to make things using conventional PHP coding. It looks like he tried to learn newbies how to make an application with PHP instead of really using CodeIgniter…

I don’t see any good practice of CI used or something really interesting. For example he could have talked about using a base controller (MY_Controller.php) or he could have better shown how to abstract things in libraries and helpers, instead of this we come with an application with very heavy code all in controllers. Add to this that he don’t use modern development like showing how to use some Ajax with CI.

Finally, there is more story about how he discuss with the client than showing really good practices or advanced technics. I think the author is himself a beginner with CI, and this story with the client discussions really too much detailed become annoying before the middle of the book.

I will not recommend that book to anyone, even not to beginners. Instead it would be better to begin PHP with a conventional good book and then switch to CI by reading the User Guide and asking help on the forums.

I read this book.
Having done 2 litle projects with CI it make me understand how to implement better MVC with CI.As someone wrote it is almost a introduction for how to implement agile and mvc with CI
but reading this book and also the guide is helpfull start write with CI and programmers with some experience will not have many problems doing a site.
Dimis

In this Forum (or User Guide) is much more than in this book….

Not worth the money! -    In my opinion, of course 😉

Anyway, a book must not be a user guide….
There is a user guide already!
And also it is true that there are some more advance books at mvc,agile and php.
But also this book has some interesting topics as the shopping cart etc.

I’m new to CodeIgniter.  It’s a breath of fresh air coming from Symfony, but I’m finding Professional CodeIgniter somewhat difficult to follow given the errors.  I’ve found at least 3 that aren’t in the errata in a 10 page or so span.  I’ve spent half the morning debugging the example code.  Given that I think it would be tough for someone moving from procedural PHP to OOP and frameworks to follow what’s going on.  I’m looking forward to having a look at Jamie’s book when it comes out.

I’ve got that book and i gave it to a new bloke at the company to start off on. He has had loads of trouble with it! He has compiled an A4 page of mistakes in it already and he hasn’t even finished following all the examples yet!

If i were you i would just read the user guide and download one of the open source cms’s that people have made such as “inktype” and “blaze”. They’ll be much more useful.

Can i ask what you disliked about symfony and where CI is better? i had a look at the symfony docs and it looked ok to me. I’d be really interested to know why you have moved over to CI.

Cheers.

We’re not an actual software oriented shop.  I’m basically the lone developer for a small research company and inherited several symfony projects from my predecessor.  Basically it’s too industrial strength for 99% of our projects.  It has copious documentation, but I’ve always found the tutorials such as Jobeet confusing.  There were too many moving parts.  It seemed, to me, like things were put in certain places without any real explanation as too why.

I’ll also add that we decided to make the switch to CI because a web consulting firm we sometimes use raved about it, and so far my experience with it is that it’s far more intuitive than Symfony.

Oh okay cool. I’m always interested to know the business decisions behind choosing a framework. That was the only reason i asked.

Cheers!

Is there any chance that you all could post the errors you all have found?  I don’t know if I’ll keep trying to plow through the book, but it would certainly be helpful if I do, or someone else comes along with issues like mine.

Thanks

The guy that did it has only written it down on paper. I’ve asked if he’ll commit them to type but he’s too busy!! have a look at the errata on the website for it for now and if he gets round to typing it up i’ll post it here.