Book Review: Learning Ext JS 3.2 by Shea Frederick, Colin Ramsay, Steve ‘Cutter’ Blades, Nigel White
I’ve been working with ExtJS for almost two years now. And when I started to to study this javascript library, I read Learning Ext JS book (same authors as this one) and it helped me to understand ExtJS better.
Packt Publishing released Learning Ext JS 3.2 earlier this month (October-2010) and they sent me a review copy. So this post is a review of Learning Ext JS 3.2 by Shea Frederick, Colin Ramsay, Steve ‘Cutter’ Blades, Nigel White. This is my honest opinion about it.
Motivation
As you can see, if you navigate through my blog, I am an ExtJS fan and I use it daily in my work.
Sencha website has a good set of examples, a good documentation and a great forum. But these resources are not enough if you really want to learn ExtJS and become an Ext expert.
Learning Ext JS 3.2 is very hands on, and it is very practical. It is a big Ext JS tutorial. You don’t have to know javascript (it is good if you have some though), they will explain everything you need to know to start developing with ExtJS and they cover all the major Ext components.
If you do not have any knowledge about ExtJS, when you finish this book, you will be able to develop Ext applications easily. If you do know ExtJS, this is a great book to recycle your knowledge about it.
The code is clean and readable. They first explain what is the Ext component and what it is used for, then they display the code and explain what the code does.
The authors are also great. If you visit Sencha forum frequently, you may have noticed the authors answering or starting a thread. They help the Ext community a lot, so they know what they are talking about. Shea Frederick (also known as VinylFox) writes in his blog about Ext JS: http://www.vinylfox.com/. Steve ‘Cutter’ Blades also writes in his blog about Ext JS: http://blog.cutterscrossing.com/.
My opinion about this book
It does what it says it is on the cover, and it is well organized, well written and consistent.
The book is focused: there is no long introduction (personally, I hate books with long introductions).
The book is hands on (personally, I hate studying only theory).
The book covers excellent examples using components provided by ExtJS framework.
It covers all of the major features of the Ext framework using interactive code and clear explanation coupled with loads of screenshots.
Conclusion
This book is great if you are getting started with ExtJS. It is also a great reference for those who work with ExtJS everyday.
It is worth to have it.
You can check out a sample chapter of Learning Ext JS 3.2.
And this is the link to the book page.
Glad you enjoyed it Loiane. Im with you on the long introduction and theory comments, definitely a pet peeve of mine as well. Hands on examples and getting right to the point were two of my goals with this book.
Cheers!
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