I’ve had some time to really dig in to Matt Snider’s latest book, Yahoo! User Interface Library 2.x Cookbook, and have some great things to say about it. I wanted to take a different approach to reading and reviewing this book, and hopefully it proves helpful to readers. I’ve been working on whoopdwhoop.com in my free time a lot lately, and normally as I’m developing front-end code using YUI, I reference their online documentation (which is pretty good IMO) when I have questions. I decided to just rely on this book for the past few weeks to really see how useful it was as a reference while developing. In short, it has been a great development companion. Let me explain…
I was working on adding some DataTable functionality for a client’s site, and found the chapter in Matt’s book to provide great examples and explanations for getting it going relatively quickly. He lays out multiple use cases for the DataTable, as he does so with just about all of the chapters, and that wide coverage provides great reference as I found each example provided additional insight into how to use the particular component of the YUI library. I think this approach will be a great way for beginners to ramp up to using the library, as they start fairly vanilla and basic, but as you progress the more advanced use cases and features are discussed. For a developer that is more familiar with the basics, they will quickly learn to jump a few sections in to each chapter to get to the meat of what they want to learn.
That’s one example of how I found the book to be helpful in practice. If you want a solid picture of how you will work with YUI, this book is great.
One Comment
Uhh, are you talking about us? You should throw in a shout out. Thought we were friends. sheesh…