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Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook

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This book is the perfect way to add the capabilities of Yii to your PHP5 development skills. Dealing with practical solutions through real-life recipes and screenshots, it enables you to write applications more efficiently. Overview In Detail The Yii framework is a rapidly growing PHP5 MVC framework often referred to as Rails for PHP. It has already become a solid base for many exciting web applications such as Stay.com and can be a good base for your developments, too. This book will help you to learn Yii quickly and in more depth for use in for your developments. "Yii Application Development Cookbook" will show you how to use Yii efficiently. You will learn about taking shortcuts using core features, creating your own reusable code base, using test driven development, and many more topics that will give you a lot of experience in a moderate amount of time. The second edition fixes all errata found in the first edition and also features new recipes on the client side, HTTP caching, and using Composer with Yii. "Yii Application Development Cookbook" will help you to learn more about the Yii framework and application development practices in general, showing shortcuts and dangerous things you shouldn’t do. The chapters of the book are generally independent and since this book’s goal is to enhance a practical approach to Yii development, you can start reading from the chapter you need most, be it Ajax and jQuery, Database, Active Record, and Model Tricks, or Extending Yii. With all the recipes grouped in 13 chapters, you will write your applications more efficiently using shortcuts and using Yii core functionality in a good way. The most interesting topics are; Yii application deployment, a guide to writing your own extensions, advanced error handling, debugging and logging, application security, performance tuning, and much more. "Yii Application Development Cookbook" will help you to learn more about the Yii framework and application development practices in general. You will write your applications more efficiently using shortcuts and using Yii core functionality in a good way.. What you will learn from this book Approach This book is a collection of Yii recipes with chapters generally independent of each other. It is full of practically useful solutions and concepts explained with code and relevant screenshots and diagrams. Who this book is written for This book is for developers with good PHP5 knowledge who have tried to develop applications using Yii. An object-oriented approach and MVC knowledge will be a great advantage as Yii uses these extensively.

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

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About the author

Alexander Makarov

4 books7 followers

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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
1 review1 follower
October 20, 2011
I started reading the Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook, written by Alexandar Makarov, a month back and it turned out to be a very nice and well-structured read.

There are 13 chapters in the book, covering majority of the important features and aspects of Yii Framework, including topics like URL Routes, AJAX and jQuery, Database & Active Record, Forms, Modules, Components, Widgets, and also some Testing, Performance, and Security related examples, which are ready-to-use in PHP-based web-applications.

The cookbook is all about examples, demonstrating various features of Yii Framework. This book will benefit those developers who have a basic knowledge about Yii, and have a limited amount of time to work on their projects, as it’ll provide you with a large number of quick solutions which are very generic and practical. And the best thing is, the examples can be applied to your projects in a matter of seconds.

The Yii Framework official documentation is generally not considered to be very good, due to lack of many such examples. Yii is relatively new web-application framework in the PHP scripting line, and due to this reason, the documentation is still going through a lot of changes. This book completes it by providing a large variety of examples on almost every feature in Yii.

Although it’s a good read, I won’t recommend it to the beginners who are starting to learn Yii or PHP. As I just mentioned, the book emphasize on real-time examples, not the basic theory part. However, I would consider the combination of Yii Definitive Guide (available on YiiFramework.com), and this coobook to be perfect for every aspiring Yii developer. The definitive guide will walk you through the basics of Yii, explaining most of it’s features and provide some basic examples. And the cookbook will sharpen your knowledge by providing more straight-forward examples, which are easy to understand and apply in our day-to-day work.

Another thing I like about this book is that, it provide references to every topic after examples, for further reading, and understanding the concept completely.

I also learnt some cool new Yii tricks, which I find very useful, and rarely available on the Internet, hence making it a worthwhile experience for me.

I highly recommend that every Yii developer should buy it, and read. It’ll come very handy in tight situations when it’s difficult to find quick solutions to your web-development related queries.
1 review
October 1, 2011
Yii Cookbook by Alexander Makarov

After reading “The Definitive Guide to Yii” (provided with the framework) and starting some basic applications with Yii, I thought it was time for me to explore Yii some more and get most out of it. As part of a promotion program of Packt Publishing, I was able to get a free review copy of the eBook “Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook” by Alexander Makarov. This review consist of three parts; a short summary of the book, some pros and cons and my final conclusion.


Short book summary


As the book is a “cookbook”, it gives you recipes for making Yii-dishes. With its 13 Chapters it covers probably all interesting aspects of making applications on the Yii framework i.e. using the framework efficiently, extending the framework (community components / other libraries), taking care of security, debugging and logging, fine tune an application, making it production ready and deploying it to a server. Check the books table of contents for a complete list of subjects.


Every recipe in the book consists of a short introduction, code implementation, explanation of the code and a list of additional references of where you also might be interested in. Most of the time you will get enough information from the recipe itself, but if the recipe is something completely new it’s probably best to extend your knowledge with some additional information.


Pros and cons


After reading the book I came up with the following list of pros and cons. As probably every educational book, the book has some typos, I wouldn’t call it a con though.


Pros


•Easy to follow recipes (intermediate level)
•Additional references with every recipe
•Covers a lot important aspects
•Errata page on a dedicated site for the book


Cons


•Highly repetitive instructions


Final conclusion


The books preface suggests the book is for developers with good knowledge of PHP5 and is familiar with the basics of Yii. In my opinion less knowledge of PHP5 will also get the job done, as important aspects of the language will be referenced in the additional references with the recipes. It might slow down the learning process though.


If you understand the structure the book provides, and don’t mind repetitive instructions for every recipe, you might want to buy this book to extend your Yii knowledge. The book certainly helped my understanding of the Yii framework and made me able to produce more secure, better performing code and produce applications in a shorter time.

Profile Image for Andrew.
1,021 reviews11 followers
February 2, 2013
I you're learning Yii framework this book is a 'must read'. After I learned about it, I bough it strait away and just couldn't wait for it to be finished (it was a preorder). Even after reading Web Application Development with Yii and PHP and Yii framework definitive guide I still got a lot of ideas of how my code can be improved and great features I could use in it. The book is very easy to read and follow with examples. Almost every recipe tough me something new and greatly improved my knowledge of Yii framework. If you're learning Yii framework you must read this book.
Profile Image for Andrew.
1,021 reviews11 followers
June 16, 2013
The cookbook covers practical Yii application development tips which will help you develop better applications, and it also has recipes for important Yii features which are very useful to know.

The book is written by Alexander Makarov who is an experienced engineer from Russia and has been a Yii framework core team member since 2010. He also was the technical reviewer for three other books related to Yii, so you can be sure the cookbook is written by someone who knows inner workings of Yii framework.

The cookbook has a similar format to other PacktPub cookbooks and is easy to follow, but you should have at least a basic understanding on how Yii framework works before starting with recipes. The recipes are split to 13 chapters that will show you how to use Yii efficiently.

The cookbook contains 90 recipes (if my finger counting is correct) and covers a wide range of topics. Recipes could be categorized in: simple recipes (you're probably already using them), advanced (or good to know) recipes, complex recipes (which will need more fiddling around to completely understand how they work) and recipes which will make you question yourself "Why the hell I'm not using this in my application?".

If you're serious about learning Yii framework you should definitely buy this book. Even if you already have a good understanding of Yii framework I'm sure you will find recipes which will make you even better. Of course if you're just thinking about learning Yii framework you shouldn't start with this book.

You can find a more in-depth review at the following page http://www.ifdattic.com/2013/06/02/re...
1 review
June 20, 2013
DISCLAIMER: I got a free review copy of the eBook version of “Yii Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition” from the publisher.

This Yii cookbook is intended for PHP developers that are already familiar with the framework. Its 13 independent chapters feature 90 recipes grouped by framework feature or concept.

This edition corrects the errata found in the first one (and adds a few), and uses a more readable monospace font for code listings and code words. Compared to the first edition, all original recipes seem to be kept in place, and there are only 3 new ones. The author also created a GitHub repository with the code provided in most of the recipes.

What I specially liked in this cookbook is that the author shares his deep knowledge of Yii’s core mechanisms, and implements beautiful reusable code in efficient --and tasteful-- recipes, with a steady goal of performance. It however took me some recipes to get used to the “How to do it.../How it works...” structure.

I rate “Yii Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition” 4,5/5 to leave some room of improvement. It is nonetheless an excellent addition to Yii books in general and provides several unique and enlightening recipes that are extremely useful and inspiring to the serious Yii 1.1.x developer.

My original review can be found on Amazon, and my company's blog features a complete review in French.
Profile Image for Alan Willms.
2 reviews
June 24, 2013
After four years working with Zend Framework, I discovered Yii Framework in one of its first releases. At that time the framework had much to grow, but still made my productivity go to the stars. Combining the velocity and easiness of Yii and Zend powerful components, my life as a developer became much better than before.

This book gave me some refreshing airs on Yii, reviewing lots of components I didn't know or didn't use in their full potential, reading with the safety of relying in one of the guys who actually wrote lots of Yii lines of code.
Profile Image for Juliano Baggio di sopra.
2 reviews5 followers
August 10, 2014
An complete work of this amazing framework. Contains practical examples and tips hard to find in the forums.

Could talk more about scopes, but this detail does not remove the importance of this book.

I suggest to anyone who wants to learn or increase your knowledge of the framework. Required reading for beginners and advanced users.
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