Book Review "CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development"

This book is a good introduction to the CodeIgniter library. CodeIgniter is a multi-purpose PHP library that contains a lot of good functionality and is easy to use. This book is a survey-level guide to the library, accompanied by a great many easy to read code snippets that help the reader understand CodeIgniter usage.

Here are some of the topics I found most useful:

- MVC programming
- PHP Style
- Benchmarking (timing ticks)
- Input and security
- Email
- File Upload
- Pagination
- Session management
- Database interaction (to include 'Active Record' implementation)
- User Authentication & Security
- Tips on building a large-scale application
- RESTful Web Services
- Extending CodeIgniter and sharing back with the community

I found this book to be an easy read. I've done a little PHP coding, but not a great deal, so I really appreciated the easy to read code snippets that accompanied nearly every topic. The book covers a lot of territory, so there's not a great amount of detail on any of the covered topics, but there is enough material to give you a taste of what the library holds. If that's not enough to help you implement what you need, at least you're aware of what CodeIgniter can do for you.

The book's back cover says this is a book for advanced PHP developers, but I'm not sure that's the right target audience-- I'd expect a true expert might feel they're getting too little advanced material here. For newbies to mid-level PHP coders, though (like myself) I think this book does a great job of introducing the types of things you can do in PHP and some really easy code examples to leverage.

If you've got an interest in PHP and are looking for a good library to let you write advanced web site functionality easily, I'd encourage you to check out "CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development". You can find it here.

Happy Coding!