Safronov Mark, Winesett Jeffrey. Web Application Development with Yii 2 and PHP: Fast-track your web application development using the new generation Yii PHP framework

2nd edition. — Packt Publishing, 2014. — 391 p. — ISBN: 978-1-78398-188-5.Yii is a high performance PHP framework used for rapid web application development. It is well designed, well supported, easy to learn, and easy to maintain. This book embraces the learn-by-example methodology to show you the most important features of the Yii 2 framework. Throughout the course of this book, you will build a simple real-world application; each chapter will introduce you to a new functionality and show you how to tweak your application. Instead of trying to be an all-encompassing reference about the framework, this is a walkthrough of the really important pieces of information that you have to understand in detail.This book is a guide that describes the process of incremental, test-first development of a web application using Yii framework Version 2.
The Yii framework, hosted at http://www.yiiframework.com/, is a PHP-based application framework built around the Model-View-Controller composite pattern.
It is suitable for building both web and console applications, but its feature set makes it most useful for web applications. It has several code generation facilities, including the full create-read-update-delete (CRUD) interface maker. It relies heavily on the conventions expressed in its default configuration settings.
Overall, if all you need is a fancy interface for the underlying database, there is probably nothing better for you than the Yii framework. Given the extensive configuration options, any kind of application can be made from Yii.
Version 2 of the Yii framework is built utilizing the latest improvements in the PHP infrastructure collected over the years. It uses the Composer utility (see https:// getcomposer.org/) as a primary distribution method, PSR levels 1, 2, and 4 from the PHP Framework Interop Group guidelines (see http://www.php-fig.org/), and PHP 5.4+ features, such as short array syntax and closures.
At the time of writing, Yii 2 is at the stage of late beta. Some changes are expected, but there should not be backward-compatibility-breaking changes anymore. Thus, the content of this book can be reasonably trusted even if the framework can attain some additional features after this book is published.