Naneau

It’s been a while since I’ve looked into ExtJS. I used it on a few projects until about a year ago, but due to a switch to Adobe Flex at Angry Bytes I haven’t used it a lot recently. I was contacted by Packt and asked if I’d review a book for them. Sell-out as I am, I said I’d do it. Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook is a programming style cookbook, which means it’s jammed full of “recipes”, that explain how to do various things with ExtJS. For many programming related books I find that style to be simplistic and annoying. As ExtJS can be quite complicated to somebody who hasn’t seen it before, and even the official documentation is a hard read, this book does provide an interesting perspective.

Most common things you’ll run across in the base development for rich internet applications are covered, and then some. It’s a good thing too, because it’s all too easy to get stuck when developing for ExtJS, for javascript novice and experienced programmer alike. For somebody who already knows the ins and outs of ExtJS there’s little added benefit over the manual, but for somebody who needs practical advice in the form of examples ExtJS Cookbook is nice to have around. It does assume a certain knowledge of both javascript and internet development in general though, but as I don’t think complete novices should jump into advanced development anyway, this shouldn’t be a problem.

This book is meant as a reference or composed tutorial, and it’s something you’ll find yourself coming back to during development. I experimented a bit with ExtJS again – just for fun – while reviewing the book. I did find that picking up the book and looking for things make for a much more pleasurable experience. Having a jumping off point did make life easier for me. I hacked together a little database management tool with ease. With the downloadable code you get to the phase where you’re modifying something that works without going through the “what on earth am I supposed to do”-phase, which is all too common with complex frameworks like ExtJS.

That being said, there is definitely no big “depth” in the book. That is of course the point of a “cookbook”, but it does sometimes leave you wondering. There is no mention of back-end technologies for instance. The book uses the often seen Sakila sample database, but it doesn’t tell you how to get that from MySQL to JSON and the browser. There is however a nice “How it works” section with all section. That, for me, made this book interesting enough to keep around while playing. Although they are only short, they just keep you interested enough to keep going, something that I sometimes found hard to do with just the manual.

There’s a good focus on common patterns in the book, and there’s even an entire chapter dedicated to them. I did find this to be a nice thing, as in javascript development there isn’t a whole lot of consensus on patterns. The code in the book is all nicely laid out, and clear and concise. Most of the book is about the creation of certain layouts, grids or forms, which tend to have easy to read code anyway. Not that that makes writing such code any easier of course, but hey, that’s what books are for. Personally I did find that the code could have used some inline comments, but as there is plenty of explanation besides it I can’t say that annoyed me a lot.

In general I liked the book, and the opportunity to look back at ExtJS. Although I have quite a bit of experience developing for ExtJS, I did see explanations and code examples that made things clearer for me. I don’t think I would have looked for this kind of book by myself, but, as said before, for ExtJS it makes a whole lot more sense to me than, say, for PHP or JQuery which tend to be much easier to get your head around by themselves.