Review: Instant ExtJS Starter

Recently, Packt Publishing published a book by N. Bhava on ExtJS. It’s a fairly short book, about 60 pages long. The idea is to get you started with ExtJS. If you don’t know what ExtJS, it is a framework to develop the front-end of web applications. Today, users except web applications to behave must like desktop applications, and a typical web developer is much more like a GUI programmer just a few years ago. In order to get started with ExtJS, the book is an excellent introduction. By reading the book, it quickly becomes obvious that today’s web developers just have a great deal of knowledge of JavaScript, object-oriented programming, HTML and CSS. JavaScript is a class-less object-oriented programming language. But ExtJS is based on the notion of classes, and they are somehow emulated by plain JavaScript. The author does not go into details - probably due to the limited length of the book. A book of less than 60 pages cannot scratch the surface no matter how great the author is. Indeed, the book is quite well written, and the flow of the book is fine. But I must be honest, I have tried ExtJS ever before, and the book is too short for my taste. I do like the cook-book like steps in how to install ExtJS. And I like the usage of the browsers’ debugger to inspect code and DOM. The proof-reading of the book could be better. On page 9, the different edition of ExtJS is mentioned twice, and the example of page 35 has an extra </tpl> tag. If you have another web framework (jQuery UI, YUI, etc.), you will find the book useful. It will give you a clear idea of what ExtJS is all about in a short time. The author emphases early that the strength of ExtJS is it’s components. The major components (layout, containers, data, templates, and forms) are discussed. In particular, the layout and data components are nicely explained. You can find the book here.