Codeigniter (aka CI) is an MVC framework that helps you building websites. You don’t know what is MVC? Bad. It’s a way of writing code that try to split software in three pieces: Models, which is the part that deals with your site entities, and held the classes that describes your site domain. Views, which held the presentation layer and output html/css/js data to the browser client. Controller, the layer that uses models, held the business logic of your site and calls views to send responses to users.
I don’t like a lot MVC, but I understand the power of frameworks and I think that every developer that works on big projects should use a framework, because you can gain time just by not developing database layer, or helper functions or plugins or modules that someone already made better than you. As read on this book by Eli Orr and Yahuda Zadik, now I know that Codeigniter is a mature framework that has everything you need to held big projects like, for example, a community, and this book can help you to understand CI naming conventions, configurations and folders and lets you begin making code knowing what are you doing. There is a lot of code in the book (some could be really useful to interact with third parties services like Google Maps and Linkedin or Flickr), and you can download everything from the author site. Published by Packt, it costs $34.99.
