My journey to learn CodeIgniter
Here is a short story on how I started learning & training myself in Codeigniter framework & ended it within less than a month.
CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications.
When it comes to self-learning, we always start with a very deep interest in the beginning but later on, we start losing interest & laziness starts increasing. This is a very common issue with most web developers. Even though I tried to learn Codeigniter many times, for some reason, I left it behind. So this time I took a risk which actually helped me stay focused on it. I had a job creating a Web application. So I decided to make it using Codeigniter Framework only. Even though I didn’t know anything about Codeigniter. So here is one risky strategy I used. As there is a saying that “Need is a root cause of all inventions”. This is something like that, except it is about learning & not inventions. So let’s get back to the point, here are some most important things I have been following in my learning process.
1. Always be enthusiastic. This is the key to learning anything.
2. Decide a fixed schedule for daily learning, I allocated daily 2 hours to this. And also set targets for your next day’s learning.
3. Never use any books, the User guide provided by Codeigniter is the Best to follow.
You can get it here & it is also available in the package we download for framework code. Just start through each link one by one in the “Table of content” & test through examples
4. Never think of it as a normal PHP scripting, as it is totally different approach. So before you begin learning it, set this thing in your mind & never try to compare it with normal PHP scripts.
5. Remember one thing, it will look like very lengthy scripting in the beginning but in the end, you will start to feel it as rapid scripting. And seriously I also felt, in the beginning, like why would someone do these all code while there is a simple code in PHP for the same purpose, but after learning Codeigniter, I never wanted to get back on normal PHP scripting.
6. Target a Simple CRUD web application that can have the following feature
– List all records of a specific table in the database
– Create a page with a form to add records to that specific table
– Create a page with a form to Edit records into that specific table
– Add the functionality to delete a specific record
– Add functionality to search records
These are the core points to learn as a beginner. And these are Must develop first.
7. Once you get used to with CRUD development, you can try out some advanced modules development Like e.g. ajax integration, file upload code, records pagination, records sorting. You can look for some interesting tutorials on Codeigniter & try out them.
8. Do something creative to keep yourself on track. I kept tweeting all the time about the learning experience, which looks funny but it helped me a lot to keep myself concentrated.
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