Customer Reviews

Mootools Essentials: The Official MooTools Reference for JavaScript(TM) and Ajax (FirstPress)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

Unfortunately, this book only covers a brief overview of what the components of MooTools offers. It doesn't really go into how you can use them to your benefit.

That being said, even the author thinks that there was a lot left out of this book, and is putting it into version 2.

One thing that's really missing is an index. That alone would have given it an extra star.

I bought this book because I fell in love with MooTools, and figured that it would be a great reference. It's a horrible reference - mainly because there is --- I still can't believe this --- NO INDEX! Frankly, I don't care if the documentation is amazingly detailed and fully comprehensible, if you can't find how the Element.GetStyle() function works when you need to, what good is it?

If you're learning MooTools, I recommend you stick with the online docs. Unless they reprint this book with an index.

This book is a reference book about Mootools, with a lot of litle examples. I miss a more complete set of examples in the chapter about ajax and many others. But in short: a usefull book.

I must concur with the views expressed by a number of other reviewers: the lack of an index in anything that calls itself a "reference" is pretty inexcusable. Additionally, none of the pages give an indication as to which section/chapter you are in, making even flipping into a particular area likely to hold needed information a chore as well. Instead, every page lists nothing but the book title and product series... as if I didn't already know what I was holding.

The information contained inside isn't bad per se, but the organization is at times less than straightforward and made more so by the lack of simple publishing standards mentioned above.

The PDF version may be preferable as it should at least be search-able to make up for the structural oversights of the publisher. Hopefully a second edition will include more material and correct these problems, but until then, I couldn't recommend it as a reference.

While it is great to have a book about MooTools, this one unfortunately has problems. It is filled with small and large technical inaccuracies and omissions. If you already know JavaScript and the DOM and can read past the errors, this book provides an average overview of MooTools. If you are new to JavaScript or the DOM, I'd suggesting staying away from this book until you know more. Otherwise it will leaving you with misconceptions.

For example, the description of the very important 'this' keyword is just wrong. The book says that 'this' "represents the current scope", which is not true. The 'this' keyword actually refers to the object on which a method is executing or the global object. A common small error is for the author to write "syntax" when he means "semantics". An error by omission is that the reason for needing all the 'bind' stuff is never even discussed (the reason being that MooTools uses a custom event dispatch system rather than assigning functions directly to event properties). There are plenty more.

I also find it misleadings that the tagline on the front cover is "The Official MooTools Reference for JavaScript and Ajax Development", yet in many places the author says something like "I'm not going to describe that feature here, see the online documentation for information". That makes for a rather poor "official reference".

Good content but no index which makes it difficult to refer back to a subject.

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.

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!

I purchased this book with two day shipping for a project with a tight deadline. I got the book on time from Amazon, but there was a binding error and instead of MooTools the inside of the book is "Android Essentials". (Another reviewer seems to have the same problem) I noticed the publisher offered PDF of this book, so I called Springer (the publisher) directly. They were unwilling to send me a PDF of the book so I could get my project done on time. I am not happy. Now I will need to wait many days for this problem to be fixed when a simple PDF could have saved the day. Not a good customer service experience.