ExtJS 3.0 Cookbook Released

A few weeks ago I received a final review copy of the Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook by Jorge Ramon and started to work my way through it. It can be a quick read since the text is sparse - its mostly made up of code - but I thought it would be good to really take an in depth look at the example code as well.

I should say that im not the kind of guy that this book is targeted at, but I ended up enjoying it anyway. I prefer a little more explanation in my books instead of the example driven cookbook style, but I gave it a read through because Jorge is an awesome guy, and it's Ext JS related, so I cant resist - im an Ext JS addict.

The Author

I was surprised when I initially found out that this book was being put together, mostly because it was being written by a person I had never heard of. The author, Jorge Ramon at the time of starting this book had not a single post on the ExtJS forums, which is where most people head when they need to figure something out, or when they have something to share. This fact alone is a great testament to the authors intelligence and the quality of the documentation and examples that are provided with Ext JS.

Aside from the occasional quirk in the book, Jorge has done an amazing job putting together a quality product that will no doubt be useful to everyone. There can be slight grammatical problems in the text, such as incorrect tenses, and odd sentence structure, but like I mentioned earlier, the book is sparse on text.

The Approach

The cookbook style of book has a unique format where you have each example broken down into 'what', 'how', 'why' and 'more'.

For Example:

• Subject (what) - short explanation of what is to be done.
• How to do it... - actual code with minimal explanation.
• How it works... - short explanation of what happened.
• There's more... (optional) - other related uses or features.
• See also... (optional) - related sections within the book.

If you read anything, it should be the "How it works" sections, which have brief explanation of the example. The "Subject" section in big black headings is also quite useful to read before looking at the code. I would suggest ignoring the "See also..." sections while reading through, as they seem to just be used for looking up related tasks, though I found them quite unhelpful for even that.

The Recipe Code

In general, the code examples are of good quality, and the suggested methods and practices in the book are inline with whats recommended. There are a couple places where variables are not defined (var'd), making them inherently global, but hey, we all are guilty of this flaw. Probably the most confusing portion of this book is where the author uses the Ext.ux namespace to place application layout code, which is specific to your application, therefore not likely to be a "User Extension" which is what the Ext.ux namespace is reserved for.

The screenshots that go along with each example are excellent, and most have arrows directing you toward the change made. These changes also have a corresponding bold line in the code sample.

This book has a huge amount of XML examples, which can be a hard thing to come across in the JavaScript community since most of us despise XML and cant wait to get rid of it. For those of you that need to use XML, the Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook will no doubt be a huge resource for learning the oddities involved in using XML data with Ext JS.

Summary

Probably what you want to know is "would I buy this book" - the answer is yes. I have no doubt that this book will help anyone working on an Ext JS project.