Please help me to understand proper join syntax.

I have table named inventory which has:

trans_id    
trans_items items -> item_id         
trans_user  employees -> person_id           
trans_date                   
trans_comment                
trans_inventory     

As you can see above, trans_items is a foreign key in items table, and trans_user is a foreign key in employees table.

Now what I want to do is to display in HTML the inventory table, but instead of displaying the item id, I want the ITEM NAME to be displayed.

Here is what I have done. Please note I'm using CodeIgniter.

public function getData(array $inputs)
{
    $this->db->select('trans_items, trans_user, trans_date, trans_inventory, trans_comment');
    $this->db->from('inventory');
    $this->db->order_by('trans_date desc');

    return $this->db->get()->result_array();
}