Review: Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

Well, It’s been a complete month since I started reading the Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook, written by Alexandar Makarov. I wrote a preview of the book a month back, which can be found here (Book Preview: Yii Application Development Cookbook).

There are 13 chapters in the book, covering majority of the important features and aspects of Yii Framework, including topics like URL Routes, AJAX and jQuery, Database & Active Record, Forms, Modules, Components, Widgets, and also some Testing, Performance, and Security related examples, which are ready-to-use in PHP-based web-applications.

The cookbook is all about examples, demonstrating various features of Yii Framework. As I mentioned in my previous Preview post, this book will benefit those developers who have a basic knowledge about Yii, and have a limited amount of time to work on their projects, as it’ll provide you with a large number of quick solutions which are very generic and practical. And the best thing is, the examples can be applied to your projects in a matter of seconds. You may download the source-code of all the examples found in the book from the publisher’s website on buying the book.

The Yii Framework official documentation is generally not considered to be very good, due to lack of many such examples. Yii is relatively new web-application framework in the PHP scripting line, and due to this reason, the documentation is still going through a lot of changes. This book completes it by providing a large variety of examples on almost every feature in Yii.

Although it’s a good read, I won’t recommend it to the beginners who are starting to learn Yii or PHP. As I just mentioned, the book emphasize on real-time examples, not the basic theory part. However, I would consider the combination of Yii Definitive Guide, and this coobook to be perfect for every aspiring Yii developer. The definitive guide will walk you through the basics of Yii, explaining most of it’s features and provide some basic examples. And the cookbook will sharpen your knowledge by providing more straight-forward examples, which are easy to understand and apply in our day-to-day work.

Another thing I like about this book is that, it provide references to every topic after examples, for further reading, and understanding the concept completely.

I also learnt some cool new Yii tricks, which I find very useful, and rarely available on the Internet, hence making it a worthwhile experience for me.

I rate this book 4 on a scale of 5, and I highly recommend that every Yii developer should buy it, and read. It’ll come very handy in tight situations when it’s difficult to find quick solutions to your web-development related queries. You can buy an electronic version of the book from the Packt publisher’s website.