The folks at Packt Publishing asked if I was interested in reviewing their upcoming title "CodeIgniter 1.7: Professional Development" due to my experience with CodeIgniter. While it is not my favourite framework (for reasons that I have explained on this blog), I still have to work with it going forward. I was interested to see what direction such a book would take. After going through it, I was happily surprised.

When I read a book about a programming framework, I'm expecting to see that they start off with the basics of using the framework, then keep expanding on the abilities of the framework. By the end of the book, you should be able to build something OTHER than the example application (if they provide one). I mean, if I just want a list of functions then I will hit up Google/Bing/Duck Duck Go to find the info I want. This book starts with the basics of the framework, and patiently builds on the concepts you previously learned. Good, clear examples of how to do things.

I thought another nice touch was the expanding into concepts like scaling the application, and extending the framework itself. If there is one thing I've learned building web apps over the years, it's that you (a) inevitably need to worry about scaling the application and (b) you end up having to make your own modifications to the framework itself to meet unique challenges for the application.

All in all, I recommend this book to anyone who is planning on using CodeIgniter 1.7 (and beyond) to build web apps. The sections on the first steps towards scaling your app, and extending CodeIgniter itself make this book stand out from the crowd.