Customer Reviews

Learning the Yahoo! User Interface library: Develop your next generation web applications with the YUI JavaScript development library.

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The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library is arguably the best JavaScript- and CSS-based collection of tools and controls for web development. The YUI team has carefully tested them on all modern browser platforms to assure near 100% compatibility across them all. They provide excellent documentation, both online and downloadable. And it's all free Open Source.

However, while each component is well documented with text and examples, there remains a need of putting it all together. This book fulfills that need in part. Admittedly, a single application that incorporates a large number of examples would be too complex to follow, but I would have liked to see more interaction. The book is riddled with errors. Most of them, fortunately, are so obvious that you wonder how they escaped an editor.

Dan Wellman is a Brit. His wry British sense of humor makes the book a pleasure to read.

I recently read Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library, written by Dan Wellman. I had been interested in learning more about YUI for awhile now, and this book was a great way to digest all that documentation, distilled. I have to say, after 30 days of using the JavaScript portion of YUI, and with the help of Wellman's book, I have taken quite a liking to it. For the purposes of this review, I will highlight a few of the things I like about YUI, and how the book brought those to light.

Ubiquity

Wellman covers some of the practical business reasons that one might consider using YUI. The code library is extremely well tested, put through its paces by roughly 3.4 billion page views per day on Yahoo's own sites. Their incentive to maintain reliable code quality is paramount.

In addition to being free to use, YUI is also generously hosted by Yahoo, meaning that you can link directly to their servers. The benefits here are twofold. First, it saves you the bandwidth cost of hosting the files yourself. Perhaps more importantly, it means if you link directly to their code, there is a high likelihood it will already be cached on a user's computer. Since it's already downloaded, this increases the perceived responsiveness of your site.

As major companies are hot-linking to the YUI files hosted by Yahoo (remember, it's permissible in this case), that means their visitors are potentially loading the same components needed by your site. This makes for a powerful, world-wide, redundant distribution hub.

Document Object Model

Wellman then explains how traversing the DOM can be streamlined. YUI augments built-in JS methods like getElementsByTagName and getElementById, with functions like getElementsByClassName and the powerful "get," which can be made to retrieve just about anything imaginable. There are also numerous methods by which you can target the children or ancestors of any element.

Events

The mark of any good library is the ability to add progressive enhancement via unobtrusive methods. Buzz words aside, that simply means that we keep our HTML clean of any unsightly behavioral markup. Wellman shows how this might have looked in the sites of yesteryear, and explains the better way to do it today, both via longhand JavaScript and in the YUI syntax.

The nice thing about using YUI is that is normalizes events across multiple browsers. This means that the incorrect implementations of Internet Explorer are abstracted from you, and you're able to focus more on crafting the interaction, instead of worrying about obscure bugs. As I said previously, that has been battle tested already, by the numerous visitors to Yahoo's sites.

There are three main ways to attach events: onDOMReady, onAvailable and onContentReady. Rather than waiting for the window.onload event to fire, which is dependent on all image downloads to finish, you can instead begin to interact with the document as soon as the HTML is loaded. The other two let you check for the readiness of a particular element, firing a function as a result.

Animation

Wellman briefly explains how animations work in YUI, and shows some of the implications for rich interactivity. Those familiar with Flash will appreciate the way that animations are defined, with start to end points, and tweening configurations in between. Wellman touches on this briefly, which is sufficient enough to get one's mind racing about the potential possibilities. Coupled with the getX, getY and getXY methods included in the util.Dom core, this leaves the door wide open for some seriously cool effects.

Another nice thing about getStyle, setStyle and util.Anim is that they all normalize the opacity property. Depending on the browser, different CSS must be applied. With YUI, you can change these on the fly, creating fade effects.

Ajax

The Connection Manager and History components are both very robust, but Wellman breaks them down into understandable chunks. Connection Mgr. allows you to define trigger events for Ajax calls, success and failure states, as well as callback functions to be fired when various things happen. History allows for you to create faux application states, so that a user can bookmark where they're at, even though it might not be a "real" URL. Additionally, this ensures that the back button continues to work as expected. Wellman explains how these work in tandem.

Drag + Drop

Wellman explains drag + drop adeptly. One can even specify boundaries beyond which an element cannot be dragged. For instance, restricting the viewport, to prevent an unintentional horizontal scrollbar via dragging an element outside the viewable area.

Conclusion

I hope that I have whet your appetite to learn more about YUI, and would highly suggest this read as a starting point. There are even entire CSS components to normalize fonts, grids, and build complex user interfaces. All of these topics are thoroughly documented by Wellman. Anyone looking to master a powerful client-side code library should definitely consider YUI, and this book.

The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a free resource provided by Yahoo! for web developers. It's a collection of utilities that enable developers to build cross-browser web applications quickly and easily. This library has been around for a few years now and is very extensive. It contains utilities, components, controls (widgets), and CSS tools. This can be very confusing for the developer who has no previous experience with using these types of tools. Even though Yahoo! has some very good online documentation, it still can be difficult to get started using some of these many online tools.

Dan Wellman really explains the main core components of YUI Library very well and would be very helpful to anybody wanting to quickly get started using the YUI.

Dan starts off with a great overview of YUI, with some simple examples. Then in the next chapter (2), the author goes into the CSS tools that it provides to help the develop create consistent web pages of layout and design. The next chapter (3), explains many of the DOM and Event manipulation classes that are provided. This is a very useful chapter because many web pages that use JavaScript require manipulation of web elements on the page. Using many the DOM methods in YUI make it very easy to access any element on a web page.

Continuing with the book, Dan then focuses on the Ajax and Connection Manager classes. Ajax has almost become the defacto-standard of displaying and access data on a web page and using classes explained in this chapter make it very easy to understand many of the useful examples the author use such as a log-in page, newsreaders, etc. I was able to following along very easily and create similar examples based upon the author's explanations.

The rest of the book goes into many of the other useful classes such as: Animation, Buttons, Navigation Trees, Content Containers, and Drag-andDrop, and Auto-complete. You can create almost any type of web interface from the components that are explained from this great book.

If there is one library you use, it should be the YUI Library because it is backed by Yahoo! so you know it is not going anywhere and fully tested and this should be your book that you buy to truly understand it.

A great buy!

Learning the Yahoo! User Interface library
Dan Wellman clearly knows the YUI. I had a problem with one of his examples, and sent an email to the publisher. Dan replied with an answer and later responded to direct questions. It is refreshing to find an author who will communicate with the reader on that level,

I found this book to be a good introduction to the Yahoo User Interface with examples on its use. However, it is lacking detailed information on the classes and their methods. Having said that, Yahoo has done a good job of giving the world a decent open source library that makes many of the tedious tasks less painful. Dan Wellman has done a good job on giving us a look into how to utilize a portion of this library.

Front-end developers will reap the greatest benefit provided they have a basic understanding of OOP and JavaScript. To quote the author, "Trying to learn how to make use of the YUI without first knowing about the JavaScript language itself... is an endeavor likely to end in frustration and disappointment."

This book is a good investment for any serious web developer.

The Yahoo! User Interface Library (affectionately known as the YUI library) is a free resource provided by Yahoo! for web developers. It's a collection of utilities that enable developers to build cross-browser web applications quickly and easily.

Before coming across this book I had never even heard of the YUI library and I was amazed by how helpful it can be for web developers. The YUI library's "plug and play" utilities allow developers with basic JavaScript knowledge to implement effects that would otherwise take a JavaScript master days to build. What's more, the utilities are designed to work seamlessly with all of what Yahoo! calls the grade-A browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari.

I'd highly recommend all web developers become familiar with the YUI library, and the book Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library, written by Dan Wellman, is an excellent place to start. The book assumes familiarity with JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and I would agree that some knowledge in these areas is required to make the most of the book's information. I would class myself as an "advanced beginner" in JavaScript and I had just enough understanding to follow along.

The author begins by describing the YUI library and its core components: utilities, controls and CSS files. He walks the reader through installation options and presents examples of YUI integration - demonstrating how a bit of simple code combined with the YUI tools can allow a developer to build an interactive calendar on her website.

He goes on to describe each of the YUI library's offerings; CSS tools, DOM event handling, the AJAX Connection Manager, animation tools, button controls and tree builders, navigation and menu builders, container utilities, drag-and-drop tools, and debugging options. Chapter Three, DOM manipulation, was particularly useful for me since I didn't know much about DOM. Mr. Wellman begins by defining DOM (Document Object Model) and explaining why it's useful for developers (it gives you access to the structure of a document, which allows you to manipulate elements of that document). He then shows how YUI tools make DOM manipulation far simpler.

Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library is a great guide to the YUI library. Mr. Wellman provides plenty of specifics, including detailed code samples. You also have access to a zip file on the publisher's web site that provides copies of all the book's code samples and images required for those samples.

I did notice a few typos throughout the book. Most of them were harmless, but one that stuck out was the fact that in several code samples 'var' (the JavaScript statement that's used to declare a variable) was typed with a capital 'V.' For the uninitiated, JavaScript is case sensitive so 'Var' will NOT work and your program will fail. Since I typed the code samples directly from the examples in the book, I spent a frustrating half hour trying to figure out why the first program wouldn't run before I noticed this error.

Overall, I'd give Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library a solid 4 out of 5. The YUI is a fantastic tool for developers, and this particular book is a good choice for any developer getting started with the YUI library - just watch out for those 'Vars'!

The Yahoo! User Interface Library sits comfortably amongst its peers, which include Prototype, jQuery and Mootools amongst many others. Arguably it can be said that the YUI library is the king among the JavaScript and CSS-libraries. With a vast number of well documented examples and near 100% compatibility amongst modern browsers, it would be difficult to find a comparable library.

It is one thing to be a well documented library, but it is another to know how to use the libraries to construct a user interface. This is the niche Dan Wellman fills with his book. Although not necessarily for the beginner, since you need a knowledge of CSS, JavaScript and a little AJAX, Wellman does a good job of explaining the concepts, especially AJAX, from scratch.

Wellman provides an A-to-Z of the library and assumes, rightly, that the reader has little or no knowledge of the library. To that effect, he does a long introduction of the YUI, following an overall review of its components, listing them in the first chapter. He then picks up a selection of some of the most established utilities, for example navigation, animation and AJAX utilities and in the following chapters he covers one or two examples for each of them.

Importantly, the book teaches the reader how to not only use the DOM manipulation and event handling aspects of the library, but also the CSS tools of the library.

Wellman does a good job of introducing the technical aspects at the beginning of each chapter, but not dwelling too long before moving on to real usage and methods.

What I would have liked to have seen is more interaction between different components written about in the book. Clearly building a fully-featured application that incorporates most or all of the key components would be unweildy, but individual and isolated examples doesn't equate real-world scenarios either. For example, it is quite conceivable that autocomplete and drag-and-drop components would be utilised on the same page; it would have been good if Wellman had explained the pains or pitfalls that may be encountered with such combinations. The negativity aside, the examples are of a good quality.

The book does contain a number of errors, but since this is the first edition you can probably forgive the editors from missing them.

A major gripe I have with this book, indeed all technical books is the lack of colour throughout. It is far easier to read and understand the example code when code colouring is employed, allowing for easier understanding of the key elements in the code. Surely modern publishing techniques can mitigate against the extra cost of colour. Indeed, I would pay more for a well-written coloured technical book.

A great summary chapter on graceful degredation versus progressive enhancement would also have been welcomed, since many developers may not consider the usability and accessibility issues of using JavaScript.

This book is certainly a good read for anyone who has basic knowledge of JavaScript, HTML and CSS and who wants to learn how to apply the YUI library in their projects, making them more interactive for the user.

This book is very difficult to understand and you'll be better off going directly to the Yahoo User Interface. The author could have been more concise and used examples that weren't so complex. I've used books to learn HTML, JavaScript, etc and I thought I could teach myself about the Yahoo User Interface but this book is not the way to do that. It's surprising to see there are so many good reviews about this book.

Learning the Yahoo UI is a good book to supplement the online content already available on develop.yahoo.com.

I would consider myself an intermediate developer when it comes to javascript. I searched for this book originally because I felt the online samples on yahoo's site were still so limited and brief in detail of usage. Dan details the usage in a way which is easier to digest but still informative. Bit wordy in places, but this doesn't detract from the books overall effectiveness.

This book is written for earlier the version of 2.x of YUI, (it was written in 2008 and version 2 was the most current at the time).

Despite it's age the most recent 2.x version, (2.8r4) still works quite well. There are some deprecated methods, but you should be able to get around this without too much trouble.

Some have said there are many errors in the book. That's not my experience, just a few typo's here and there but nothing you can't work out for yourself when you find them

But overall, it's a good book for version 2.x of YUI that helps you get your head around parts which aren't well documented online.

Well-written. The library is well-covered with good examples for each widget. I highly recommend this book.

Perhaps as a way to gain mindshare amongst programmers, Yahoo has released a user interface library. It lets webpage coders take advantage of a set of free and extensively debugged routines and widgets. Wellman explains how these are geared towards those who use CSS and, especially, JavaScript in their pages.

At a purely pragmatic level, you need have essentially nothing to do with Yahoo, or with using its main set of domains (like for email). It's not like you'll be endorsing Yahoo with your uptake of its YUI library.

Wellman points out that you need to be already conversant with CSS and JavaScript, and with Ajax. Though the book does a good book explaining Ajax from scratch.

Of the various classes and widgets in YUI, you can pick and choose for your needs. The simplest and most useful might be reset.css. This does "element normalisation". The programmers at Yahoo surveyed the major browsers and the typical platforms on which these run. From this, they made reset.css. It acts as a default stylesheet, giving roughly the same presentation results across the browsers. Removing a major pain for you. Potentially a big time saver, as it might let you avoid a lot of low level miserable grubby details about checking out your pages on various browser + operating system combinations.

The most complex section of the book is clearly the chapter on drag and drop. No surprise to any of you who might have coded DND, whether for a browser or for a desktop application. DND is often simply a real pain to code, in any language or environment. The YUI DND does help, somewhat, but still nontrivial.