CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development book review
Unfortunately it won't make you a CodeIgniter expert.
A couple weeks ago Packt publishing contacted me to review a book they had recently published, called CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development by Adam Griffiths.
The preface states the book will take you "beyond the ... user guide and into more advanced subjects". It's not obvious what advanced subjects are covered. I assume the chapters "User Auth", "User Auth 2", "Building Large Scale Apps", "Web services" are what is referred to here, as these seem to be the only chapters not covered by CodeIgniter's user guide. With the exception of "Deploying and Releasing Code to the Community" chapter, all other chapters were generally better explained and in more depth by the user guide that is packaged with every CodeIgniter download.
Whilst reading the book these are some points that stood out to me.
Chapter 1: In CodeIgniter's PHP Style Guide it states that all PHP files should omit the closing PHP tag. This is mentioned in Chapter 1, but it's not adhered to throughout the book.
Chapter 2: Validates a contact form. The validation code should really be making use of the form validation library. It is using CodeIgniter's show_404() function to send feedback to the user for form validation errors; which means the wrong HTTP header is sent. show_error() could be used here instead.
Chapter 4: Is a recipe for a user authentication system. Chapter 6 is in the user guide apart from salts. This isn't specific to CodeIgniter. It's what a web developer should know.
Chapter 5: Describes authentication using twitter and facebook. I can see this going out of date in a year or two. It's quite specific. Not really related to CodeIgniter. More suitable in a book titled user authentication.
Chapter 7: It comes across that the author is offering advice without having the experience. ie. CDN, buying a database server, building a large scale application. I would rather read an experienced developer's blog post on this topic or buy a technical book in this field.
Chapter 8: I don't like the implementation of REST. Perhaps this is a CodeIgniter problem. The recipe in the book, involves copying code into every controller. I would like to see this at the route level. Like rails. As this is a more maintainable approach.
Chapter 9: The author goes on to talk about CodeIgniter's hidden gems. But talks about helpers, which aren't hidden. In fact a quarter of the user guides table of contents is about helpers.
Conclusion
On the front cover the strap line states you will "Become a CodeIgniter expert ..." I was expecting this book to provide solutions to many of the problems developers face when developing, deploying, and maintaining websites built with CodeIgniter. Unfortunately the book didn't go much further than the user guide. I felt the contents of this book that wasn't covered by the user guide could have been summed up in a few blog posts.
What do you think?
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