Customer Reviews

Practical Ext JS Projects with Gears (Expert's Voice in Web Development)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I guess with the title of this book, I was expecting a thorough review of Ext JS and Gears. I got the former, but not the latter. The author goes so far as to say, "This book is about Ext JS, not Gears...".

So my main reason for buying the book was not really covered: Writing apps that can be used on and off line. The initial outline of the book is a thin review of Ext JS & Gears for the first few pages, and the second half consists of explaining a number of offline apps only, with an overwhelming emphasis on Ext JS.

Those are the reasons I give it only 3 stars.

That said, if you are looking for a book that will teach you Ext JS, with the novelty of Gears in the mix, this book is pretty good. The coverage of Ext JS is pretty thorough, and is covered in a variety of "cookbook" examples. That is why it got 3 stars, not 2, from me.

Summary: Good Ext JS coverage, with a very thin veneer of Gears explained, but literally no talk about on and off line apps, which seems to be the defacto reason to learn Gears at all.

This book is a must for everyone who wants to have a quick and solid grasp of ExtJS and its usefulness in practice.

The book is split into 2 parts, the first introducion Ext Core and the UI widgets in ExtJS, while the second part consists of seven different projects developed with Ext and Google Gears as stand-alone applications (one page web-apps, with data persistence in the browser - or sovereign web apps, as the author calls them).

This is not a book on Google Gears. Gears is used throughout the book only as a persistence layer, without much emphasis on its other capabilities.

The book is written from a practical standpoint, with a lot of real-life code, even in the first part, when talking about the core facilities of Ext.
A real helper for me was the diagram with the hierarchy of widgets, providing the programmer with a broader look on the library.

While definitely not a book for JavaScript starters, Practical ExtJS Projects with Gears is targeted to medium to advanced JavaScript programmers who are new to ExtJS and want to get acquainted with it in a short while. It provides a great starting point for this purpose.