As of January 2025, “The Yii Book” is no longer maintained or commercially available. “The Yii Book” is now open source and can be downloaded from its GitHub repo.

My sincerest thanks to everyone that supported the book over the years, and to the Yii community at large. I hope that open sourcing this work creates additional benefits from the years of work that went into it.

It took forever, but the fifth and final update for version 2 of the Yii framework has been posted. This brings the book to version 2.0. After a lifetime and half, and probably beyond when it’s of much use to anyone, the book is officially complete.

It took forever, and then another few years. It was just a ton of work and my life changed in ways that made having dedicated time to work on this super hard. I’ll always feel terrible about how long it took to complete the second edition. But it’s done now.

Oh man… So before I get to the good news (another update to “The Yii Book”), I should answer the million-dollar question of “Why in the #$&*$%&(&% is it taking so long to finish this book?!?!”

I’ll start by saying that, in general, self-publishing is a ton of work, as I have to do everything myself. Which seems obvious and yet… Second, the switch from Yii 1 to Yii 2 is more significant than most upgrades I’ve dealt with (e.g., from PHP 4 to PHP 5). What it comes down to is a relatively simple chapter to update, like Chapter 16, takes at least 3 full work days to do. So updating the entire book–24 chapters–is at least a full 100 days of work. And I don’t have many free full work days in my life.

For context, when I started on “The Yii Book”, I was only working for myself, as a consultant and a writer. At that time, so long ago, I could spend many full days or even weeks on the book, which I did to get the first half of the book or so done. Shortly after I started publishing this book, I went to work for a company, which was the necessary decision for me and my family. (For starters, my family has really high medical bills, and we need the health insurance.) For the past four years, I’ve been working one job and trying to work on “The Yii Book” as I can, while also not forsaking my wife and kids.

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I just posted the third update of the second edition of “ The Yii Book“. This update brings this edition of the book to 365 pages, with two more revised chapters, getting to a total of 14, and completing Part II of the book. (I’m a little bit farther along than that, but thought Part II a logical place to do this release.)

I’m about to go offline for a couple of days (for personal reasons) and was hoping to get an update out beforehand, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen. (And, as is the way with such things, if you try to do something computer-y when you have no time to deal with any complications, that’s exactly when the complications happen.)

In any case, apologies–as always–on it being so long since my last update. Chapter 13, “Using Extensions”, was a pretty brutal update for Yii 2 as no Yii 1 extension works for Yii 2. So I had to reevaluate what extensions to cover, learn enough about them, etc., etc. Also, Chapter 20, “Working with Third-Party Libraries”, covered Elasticsearch in the first edition, but that’s now possible with a Yiisoft extension, so it got moved into Chapter 13 (and rewritten).

But Chapter 13 is done and I’m a bit past that and will get out a wee little update as soon as I’m back online. I also updated all of the errata in the book and on the website and replied to those people that emailed about them. (Big thanks to people that do so; I really appreciate it!)

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