A quick introduction to Yii development

Some days ago, I have been invited to write a review for the book Yii 1.1. Application Development Starter, written by Jacob Mumm and Mark Safronov (Packt Publishing). The book is published in the "instant" book series, and is available only in its digital form. I received it as a complimentary copy from the publisher.

In the book you don't find anything that isn't available online amongst the official documentation on Yii's website or on Wikipedia. The example in the "Quick start" chapter is taken from (and links to) the official documentation, bringing your attention to the main aspects to consider and leaving out some less important details. The "Top 5 features you need to know about" chapter is a bit more interesting, because it gives you some hints about features that are a little hidden, with some usage examples. I found particularly interesting the sections about authentication and role-based access control. Again, everything is available on the web, so if you have time and want to achieve a deep knowledge of the subject this book is not for you: just go through the examples in the official documentation, access the forums, run your own experiments. But if you are short of time, and just want to know about the main benefits Yii has to offer, it might be worth buying and reading the book, because it offers a quick introduction to all the basic points you'd have to deal with when projecting and implementing a web application using Yii.