Book review: Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook by Jorge Ramon

A couple of weeks back I was contacted by Packt publishing and they wanted me to do a review on the upcoming book “Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook” by Jorge Ramon. I’m a very big fan of the Ext JS framework and use it daily in my work so – free book about it, how can I say no?

Books about Ext are very much needed since up to now, the way newcomers learn Ext (as did I) is they open the examples and just study the code, basically reverse engineering it until they get the big picture. This takes a lot of time and energy. For me personally, it was still definitely worth it. Ext JS is simply the best framework for building impressive enterprise apps in little time.

The book is quite different from any other programming book I’ve read, in that it’s practical, very hands on and example driven (hence the term “cookbook”). It’s literally “109 great recipes for building impressive rich internet applications”. It’s not something you pull out and enjoy in front of a fire (few programming books are ), it’s rather a book you use in your daily work when you need to know how to implement a specific feature or solve a specific problem

Who can benefit from this book?

I probably would not recommend this book as your first introductory book to JavaScript or Ext JS. I would very much recommend this as your second book when you’ve become a little familiar with the Ext JS framework and know basics about the Ext object model, the most common widgets and how scope works. One of the thing really lacking in Ext JS is a good introduction “big-picture” description of the framework. There is an introductory book called Learning Ext JS which gives you a good walkthrough of the basics. I think the Ext JS Cookbook serves as an excellent followup.

What I like about this book

I liked the fact that this book really is what it says it is on the cover. You get over 100 examples on how to implement very advanced functionality, explained in detail. Each example has up to 5 sections:

• Introduction of the problem to solve, plus an image and a text describing the desired result
• “How to do it…” – Code snippets that solve the actual problem, relevant lines are highlighted in bold (very good)
• “How it works…” – A detailed description of the code in the previous section
• “There’s more” – Extra tips n tricks related to the example if you want to take it further
• “See also” – Useful links to other pieces of text relating to the example

Some of the stuff you’ll learn include

• advanced drag and drop
• building complex forms
• master-detail view of data
• creating a portal
• fancy charts
• login panel

…plus many other great examples. If you just have a basic knowledge about Ext this book will definitely take you to the next level.

Favourite chapter for me personally would be the last, dealing with patterns in Ext JS. This chapter tells you about preconfigured classes, how to obtain nicely encapsulated code as well as lazy instantiation through xtypes -one of the really powerful features of Ext JS. If you’re building a large application in Ext JS, knowing about these things are an absolute must, chapter is spot on.

What didn’t I like about this book

Two things could be improved in this book.

First of all – I think the book could have had a better introduction. The first page is about browser sniffing, I expected a softer introduction providing background on Ext JS for example.

Second – When I read the “How it works…” section, I often thought to myself – tell me more, go deeper. I felt the information provided in the section could have gone more into depth, but that might just be me being over curious.

Other than the above, nothing really struck me as being bad when reading this book. Some of the new stuff in 3.0 isn’t covered (maybe I missed it), such as toolbar overflow (not such a big deal though), vbox/hbox, grouptabs. This didn’t bother me that much though, it’s impossible to cover every single widget in the library. I didn’t find any big errors in the book, which is good. Someone proof read it obviously

Final thoughts:

I think this book serves a clear purpose for anyone working with Ext JS – it’s a great toolbelt to use in your daily work. It shows you how & tells you why. Clear and concise.

Good work Jorge!