my 2 cents

After seeing quite a few reviews of the ‘Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook‘ on the Ext JS related blogs, I was curious to hold a copy of the book in my hands.

As you can guess from the title, the book contains recipes for solving GUI designs with Ext JS 3.0. In total the book comes with 109 recipes divided into 10 chapters.

Chapter 1 gives a short introduction of the Ext JS way of DOM manipulation and other basic things. Together with Chapter 10, which is about design patterns in Ext JS this are the Chapters I like most in the book, cause they help to understand the whole Ext JS picture and present content you won’t find easily in the internet.

The 8 Chapters in between contain receipts as you expect from a cookbook. People familiar with the examples provided in the Ext JS SDK will have sawn about 70% of the receipts presented in the book. In Contrast to the examples in the SDK the printed recipes come with a lot of explanation suitable for beginners with Ext JS and non Javascript geeks. The recipes which are not part of the Ext JS SDK are of high quality and fill the gap where beginners might miss examples.

Chapter 2 tries to give an introduction into the Ext JS layout engine. I use the word “try” as I would expect that the receipts are not enough to explain a beginner the insights needed to understand and create complex layouts. Moreover this chapter misses to explain the new vbox and hbox layouts introduced in Ext JS 3.0. In my view, this layouts are the most important additions to the Ext JS layout engine in the new version.

Each recipe contains the additional sections “How it works” and “There is more”. Both of this sections are helpful for people who don’t just want to cook, but want to gain more insights of the Ext JS framework.

While a recipes book always has newbies and beginners as target audience, this book is not for beginners only. The explanations often stress points which are of importance for experienced users of the Ext JS framework. Moreover the Author frequently gives hints which are of importance for big web applications.

With the precise explanations and the elegance of his own receipts the author proves himself to have an excellent skill level in providing Ext JS based solutions. The examples provided in this book are not just working somehow, they are assembled within the spirit and design constrains of the Ext JS framework itself.

Additionally, it is notable that the version number in the books title reflects the actual state of the contents. In a number of receipts the solution is done using new features which where introduced in the 3.0 version of Ext JS.

In a big online book store, I would rate this book with 4 of 5 stars.