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The Yii Books


ewbarnard
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I've been a full time PHP developer for several years, and doing software development for several decades. I began evaluating Yii as a development platform four months ago. I've now been writing PHP with Yii exclusively for a couple of months.

I found the Yii learning curve to be surprisingly difficult. What made the difference for me? Larry Ullman’s book.

I first read “Web Application Development with Yii and PHP” by Jeffrey Winesett. It was a great start, but I found I still was not able to get my first application completely put together.

I then read much of “Yii Application Development Cookbook Second Edition” by Alexander Makarov. That helped with specifics, but I still was not able to just sit down and “do” my next application.

“Yii Rapid Application Development Hotshot” by O’Meara and Hamilton III helped with some good ideas, but still didn’t take me in the direction I needed.

I’m happy to state that “The Yii Book” by Larry Ullman got me to that point where I can sit down and write the PHP/MySQL application I need to write.

It’s exactly as Larry explains in “The Goals for This Book.” What I needed was the big picture, “why you do things in certain ways.” I already know what I want to accomplish in the way of code and design; I just don’t know how to go about accomplishing that task using Yii.

Larry’s book got me over that hurdle. I’ve made a lot of use of the Yii forums and tutorials. The help is there!

I’ve found my share of “gotchas.” For example the gii/giix code generator does not create the right class names when your MySQL table has underscores in the name. The code generator uses CamelCase instead of underscores. Meanwhile, Mac has gone from case-sensitive to case-insensitive filesystems by default. Your code works fine on the mac, and when you move it to the production server running a case-sensitive Linux filesystem, your class files cannot be found.

I find the necessary clue to the problem in the Yii forums, and was able to fix my copy of the code generator. Now I just have to figure out how to contribute the fix back to the community!

Different people have different learning styles. I best learn from books. Your own results will vary. But for me, Larry’s book is just what I needed to get me past the “tipping point” and Just Do It, whatever I need to get done using the Yii framework.

I’m about half way through the new Chapter 19. I’ve been writing my own components, and the timing of Chapter 19’s arrival is perfect. I have a whole list of things which I “almost” got right! I can easily see how Larry’s recommendations make good sense, and how I can improve how I do those areas of code.

 

Ed Barnard
Cannon Falls, Minnesota

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