Where to learn Yii? [closed]

Question

I have been trying to learn Yii without luck. I find Zend Framework, Kohana, Code Igniter among other frameworks much easier to learn than Yii. The documentation also su**s. Can you post links to easy-to-understand and well written tutorials/articles? The official documentation is filled with grammar errors and seems to be rushed...

Answer 1

You can buy the Agile with Yii 1.1 and PHP5 from Packt publisher. I'm actually reading it right now. There's quite a bit of small errors in the book, you could totally tell they rushed it, probably because it's the first Yii book.

https://www.packtpub.com/yii-1-1-and-php5-for-agile-web-application-development/book?tag=ns/agile-yii-abr1/0810&utm_source=ns_agile_yii_abr1_0810&utm_medium=content&utm_campaign=naheed

There's the link, I bought mine from Amazon.

-- SQL schema in the book have typos and type errors. I just asked about it on stackoverflow too.

Answer 2

Try this link:

http://www.yiiframework.com/forum/index.php?/topic/6129-total-fresher-in-php-frameworks-and-yii-i-dont-understand-tutorials/

It's my thread and in the first post there is attached PDF. On Xmas 2009 I was beginning with Yii. I had never user PHP framework before so I was lost in terms like Controller, using views, integrated ajax etc.. So (when I understood it) I created a small manual that could help beginners. Have a look at it and let me know if it was helpful. It's not finished yet, it wants to reformulate something, but main concept of YII and MVC architecture is described..

Answer 3

Yes, I would add that both the definitive guide and the api manual can be downloaded in pdf and chm (recommended) format.

Answer 4

I've started here http://blog.dmcinsights.com/series/learning-the-yii-framework/

Then I did the online blog tutorial

A very good place to search/ask for info is the forum. The community is nice and will always answer you very fast.

Yes, the blog tutorial is filled with typos and errors of some sort. But IMHO, this is were you develop more skills. You have to actually search. Or if you're lazy, the comments after the tutorial tell you what to do. But usually, after the half of the tutorial, you'll begin to understand why it is not working and how to solve it. This is, from my point of view, the best way to learn.

Don't give up, Yii is very nice and powerful. Yii is the faster fully-loaded framework after symfony 2.

Answer 5

I started reading Larry Ullman tutorial translation (into Italian) here: http://www.programmandofacile.it/impariamo-yii-framework/ Then I went on reading the Yii documentation. And finally I started looking at the Yii forum.

Answer 6

As mentioned above, reading through the "Definitive Guide to Yii" is the best place to start as it covers all of Yii's main (and numerous) features. The "Blog Tutorial" is helpful too.

Yii also has a nice set of easily searchable and cross-referenced Class Reference (API) Docs here: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/api/

The Yii forum is very active too, with the developer himself (qiang) answering lots of questions. Yii is very actively developed so when you report bugs in Google Code you often get fast responses there as well.

Finally, included in the Yii source when you check it out of SVN is a "demos" folder which has a working Blog demo, a Hello World, and a few other demo apps.