Last week I was requested to review a book “Codeigniter 1.7 professional development” by Adam Griffiths. I was too much busy with my projects deadline and didn’t make time to read the book. To make a review I think I need to read the book with a sound mind so that I can catch up all the points that the author want to presents. Today I feel little well and start writing review after reading this interesting book “Codeigniter 1.7 professional development”.

“Codeigniter 1.7 professional development” describes the professional approach of Codeigniter base development. Each chapter is presents with example, which describe the functional activity of each topic. Anyone who has the knowledge of object oriented programming can easily go with this book. Those who are familiar with Codeigniter basics can easily start development in a professional way after reading this book.

It’s describes how to use Codeigniter build-in libraries like form manipulations, image manipulations, session class, pagination class etc. One can easily make their own custom library extending those libraries. Caching, security, query optimization is very important for professional development. This topics discussion is so impressive that anyone can understand. You can test the flavor of those mechanisms practicing the examples.

Discussion on authentication, active record for database, building large application development, web service etc. are so informative and helpful for any fresh developers who just start professional careers.

Overall this book is quite good enough for starting professional use of Codeigniter except few things. Use of layout instead of multiple views is missing. Layout is more efficient then loading multiple views every time in a controller. Again discussion on some existing Codeigniter authentication library like dxAuth, reduxAuth etc. could be a better. Another topic which is also important is “HMVC-Hierarchical Model View Controller”. This is important for module extension based application development.

I have read other two reviews in amazon.com. I am agreeing with Jack Cadman point of view that the author doesn’t have quite expertise to write such a book. Again most of the examples are available in online tutorial and Codeigniter user guide. But I want to encourage the author to write such book where he tries to present all the helps as a book. I hope after reading this reviews he will be more careful in future. All I tries to find some positive thing in the book and hence I right this reviews.

At the end I can say, if you are new professional developer or you want to start using Codeigniter for development approach you can read “Codeigniter 1.7 professional development”.