In an effort to start off my New Year’s resolution of reading more technical books, today I am  going  to publish my first book review of this year. Let’s see how many books I am going to read until December/2010.

I am going to start writing a review about the Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook by Jorge Ramon, published by Packt Publishing, who sent me a review copy of this book. 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.

ExtJS website has a good set of basic examples, but if you need something more fancy, you have to spend some time until you find what you need or make some customizations.

The good thing about this book is that is very hands on, and it is very practical, just like a cookbook. It’s literally “109 great recipes for building impressive rich internet applications”. It contains those special recipes you spend some time looking for on the Internet.

I do not recommend this book if you are trying to learn ExtJS, you need to learn some ExtJS basics concepts to understand it.

However, if you are somewhat familiar with ExtJS and you are looking to boost your knowledge about what the framework is capable of, this is a great recipe book,  and I definitely recommend it. The code is clean and readable. It’s a handy reference and a set of problem/answers that solve discrete problems.

Format of this book

This book is labeled as a cookbook, and it follows that convention quite well. There is a nice format for each recipe that mostly follows:

1. Definition/explanation of the recipe – an introduction of the problem
2. The How to do it…… section
3. The How it works… section
4. The There’s more… section
5. The See also… section

This reoccurring pattern really helps you quickly find what you’re looking for, especially when you’re using the recipe as a refresher as opposed to initial discovery.

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 “How to do it…” sections are is step-by-step, and explaining what each step does.

The book covers excellent examples using components provided by ExtJS framework.

As a cookbook, I think it missed some tips of third party plug-ins (and this is something I did not find in any ExtJS book), just like in JQuery page (maybe this is an idea for another book? ).

Conclusion

This book is a great reference for those who work with ExtJS everyday. This is one of the best books I have read about ExtJS. It is worth to have it.

You can check out a sample chapter of Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook.

And this is the link to the book page.