World Famous Comics: MooTools Essentials: The Official MooTools Reference for JavaScript™ and Ajax Development (Firstpress)
MooTools Essentials: The Official MooTools Reference for JavaScript™ and Ajax Development (Firstpress)
By: Aaron Newton Publisher: Apress Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Apress Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 300 Publication Date: August 18, 2008
Mootools is a light, modular JavaScript framework that makes adding Ajax, animations, and interactive elements to your site a breeze. But it’s more than fancy effects and shortcuts; Mootools enhances the JavaScript language and makes writing clean, object–oriented code almost pleasant. Unlocking the power of Mootools, and therefore JavaScript, isn’t that hard, but knowing where to start can be. Mootools Essentials aims to help you accomplish that task with the following:
Illustrations of nearly every class and function in the library
Real–world examples of how to use them
Written by Mootools user/contributor and Mootorial author, Aaron Newton.
You can see how Mootools makes JavaScript more powerful.
What you’ll learn
Access the complete reference to the Mootools library.
See how to use the library and understand how JavaScript/Mootools is different from other programming languages.
Get step–by–step code authoring examples.
Explore real–world examples of how to accomplish common fundamental tasks.
Who is this book for?
This firstPress book is for web developers who want to learn an easier and productive way to develop/use JavaScript and Ajax.
Sorry but... I have never written a book review before. I have read hundreds of technical computer books. I have a huge library that is used frequently. Maybe it's because I am more familiar with jquery but.... This is possibly the worst technical book I have ever purchased. Would it have been too much to include an index? I'm old so I appreciate the large print, but I suspect that they increased the font size to fill out the length to the sparse 276 pages. Chapter 13. Real World examples has a GIANT 3 examples on 5 pages. In fact the real problem with this book is the overall dearth of examples. With all the online resources available I still buy books because I like their portability and ease of use. Unfortunately with this book the only portability I am interested in is it's trip across the room onto the nearest wall. I feel bad about writing a bad review and I apologize to the author, as I am sure it was a lot of work. I'm afraid that it is probably the result of the editor and publisher that they released a product that was not yet polished. It may have been rushed out the door. Of course this is just my opinion, but please take an extra long look at the contents before you purchase.
Great book, but no index (?!) Generally, I think this book is amazing. It covers almost all of the public (API) aspects of Moo in passing but with enough depth so the developer reading is comfortable figuring out any unclear aspects on his own. It clears up possibly confusing topics (the difference between $merge and $extend, for instance) and goes over classes and inheritance pretty well. The "real world examples" are handy to refer to in a pinch, too!
The best book on MooTools by an excellent MooTools contributor MooTools Essentials finally gives some real credibility by way of a book to this great framework and it's written by one of the best contributors to MooTools.
Including writing this book, Aaron has written one of the best MooTools extensions called ClientSide. He has also written the reference documentation on the MooTools site and the best online tutorial for learning mootools at clientside.cnet.com.
Not only that, Aaron is the most responsive web personality I've ever communicated with. Both me and a colleague have made suggestions to clientside and to this book (we received the online version) and he made bufixes and corrections almost instantly and where he didn't, he provided detailed reasons why not.
The book follows an easy step by step approach to learning the framework where each chapter builds on the previous one. He uses excellent real world examples on, amongst other things, the steps one would take to create a MooTools class. The how-I-would-do-it type approach to teaching in that section is one of the best and most practical ways to teaching I've seen. It immediately answers many questions, some which I would never have thought to ask.
Okay, this sounds like a paid advertisement almost but I'm just really impressed by the book and by Aaron's contributions especially.
If you are interested in the most underrated JavaScript framework on the Internet, this is the best book to learn it from.
Great Resource and Great Price Ordered the book as soon as it came out, and have been reading it regularly ever since. It does a great job of both introducing the concepts to those who are new to the framework, as well as describing those subtle touches that make Mootools such a powerful development platform. Full of great (and light-hearted) code examples, as well as many useful tables and charts. And to top it off, the book is offered at a great price. Moo.
Fantastic read for intermediate to advanced JavaScript developers Having had experience with both Prototype and jQuery, this book actually made me a MooTools convert. Loaded with great examples, detailed explanations of each and every class and method in the library, and extremely insightful comments and tips on how and when to use use them.
Of particular interest to me were the chapters dedicated to writing classes in MooTools, as well as the last sections which lead the reader through the complete life cycle of creating reusable components. Most importantly, the thought process involved in adding each layer of complexity which helps one understand things which in other books are just a "given". I found myself saying several times: Oh! so _that's_ why they do that!
Even the appendixes are packed with clear explanations of core JavaScript concepts which are tricky and somewhat hard to grasp for the novice (bindings, closures, etc.)
The only inconvenience I found to the book was an extremely large font (at least on the PDF version, not sure about the hardcopy) which made reading code a tad obtrusive at times. Other than that, a must-have for any MooTools developer and a definite recommendation for those initiating themselves in JavaScript frameworks.
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