Review of “Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook”

So I received my copy of “Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook” and I have been reading through it lately.

I decided to read it cover to cover, even though that is definitely not how it’s supposed to be read. As it says in the title it’s a cookbook which of course means that it provides you with “recipes” on how to overcome specific problems. Actually it doesn’t even have to be a problem. It can be an optimization you would like to implement or the likes.

Before we proceed with the review, I would like to just quickly show you the basic info for the book, along with a few links and such:

Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook info

I must admit that I was initially a bit skeptic about its usefulness. After all, the Yii framework has pretty decent documentation as well as a cookbook on the site already, but already as I read through the table of contents of this book, I began to realize that a lot of the problems I was having when I was initially learning how to use Yii, were explained in this book. Things I had to ask about on the forum back then. There were answers to questions I’d never found an answer for and instead had to find alternative solutions.

But who should read this book? I would have to say it’s for everyone who wants to learn about Yii. There are some nice, established guides on the Yii website that explains a lot of stuff about Yii, and you should of course read those first. But it’s my experience that as soon as you start to play around and get creative, you soon run into a wall that blocks your path. These can be small things like how to use MySQL as your database or how to use multiple databases, but it can also be bigger things like parsing Markdown or HTML, or how to properly configure Yii to prevent certain attacks.

So can I recommend buying this book? Actually yes, I can. I’ve seen a few programming cookbooks in my time and a lot of them have been somewhat silly, in that they were really just a conversion of an already existing, freely available and easily accessible (not to mention well known), online cookbook and put it in a book form. It works it’s in no way worth paying for, in my opinion.

“Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook” is definitely worth the money and even though I have gotten an eBook copy, I might actually buy the physical book so I can keep it around as reference. It’s a “cookbook done right” and it’s no wonder that Qiang Xue, the initial creator of Yii, has vetted this book and found it to be more than acceptable.