Michael Wales

In mid-December I was asked by Packt Publishing to read and review their latest CodeIgniter book, ingeniously titled CodeIgniter 1.7, by Jose Argudo and David Upton. As you all know, my blog has been down for quite some time; although, I read the book (and subsequently gave it away to a friend), I am just now able to write the promised review.

This book targets the absolute beginner developer and it does an adequate job filling the niche, as previous CodeIgniter books on the market are drastically outdated. Unfortunately, I don’t feel this book differentiates itself significantly from the well-written CodeIgniter User Guide and many people who buy this book will feel as if they have been cheated out of $36.

Chapters 1-3 explain what frameworks are, what CodeIgniter can do for you, how to get up and running with CodeIgniter and the basics of the MVC development pattern. It’s not until Chapter 4 that we discover some truly unique CodeIgniter content with the Active Record pattern, but it doesn’t last as we drop back to some pretty basic HTML material in Chapter 5 as we build out some forms.

The rest of the book does a very good job of reiterating the content outlined in the user guide, ranging from sessions and security to the XML-RPC library. There’s even a bit of content on the Cart library which is a welcome addition since it’s relatively new.

The shining star for this book though is Chapter 7, CodeIgniter and Objects. Argudo and Upton do an amazing job describing the CodeIgniter super-global object, as well as explaining copying by reference in plain English. Unfortunately, it just kind of creeps up on you out of nowhere with very little lead in or warning that shit’s about to get deep. It’s a worthy addition to the book though and serves its purpose in separating the “restating the easy stuff from the user guide” from the “restating the object oriented stuff from the user guide” sections of the book.

All in all, if you feel as if you need the user guide read off to you in plain English, by all means buy this book. There’s nothing else on the market today that will explain virtually every aspect of the framework to you as a beginner. If you’re comfortable in reading and understanding the user guide, possibly with a bit of help from the CodeIgniter Forums, you’re going to want to pass.

Last but not least, this is one of the few books whose eBook version actually provides a legitimate value (other than just being a good option for the broke audience). If you fall between the two aforementioned groups (i.e., you are comfortable with the user guide but you don’t quite understand the CodeIgniter object model or how to best write your own libraries) buy the eBook now. You’re going to save some money and Chapters 7-9 and 15 are well worth the $28 price tag.