Packt Publishing recently provided me with a copy of their new Ext JS book called Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook. The only thing they asked for in return was a review stating my opinion.

For those who don’t know, Ext JS is a JavaScript library aimed at helping developers create web applications with customizable user interface widgets. The library is known being sturdy and for letting users easily create eye-catching designs. However, unlike many other JavaScript libraries, Ext JS is licensed under the GPL by default. For people wanting to avoid the GPL, a commercial license can be purchased.

Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook is a book which has the goal of providing Ext JS users with a wide variety of techniques and code samples with which they can use in their development of web applications. The book is well written, has nicely formatted code samples (which are also available in a zip file – a URL to the file is given in the book), and contains a lot of interesting information. However, I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook is divided into 10 chapters, with each chapter covering a different topic of the library. However, the book can really be thought of as one giant, categorized, FAQ guide on Ext JS. Each chapter contains a series of “recipes”. These recipes are specific tasks a developer might want to perform, for example: “Displaying remote data with a combo box” or “Creating a grid panel with expandable rows” or “Creating an auto-refreshing chart”.

The definition of each recipe follows a set pattern of 5 sections:

• The problem is described.
• “How to do it…” – Code for solving the problem is provided.
• “How it works…” – An explanation is given on how the code works.
• “There’s more…” – Additional, possibly useful, bits of information are provided.
• “See also…” – Other topics are suggested as further reading.

Each of these sections is given its own heading, though some recipes omit a section when it isn’t needed. This makes the book well suited as a reference guide since you know what you’ll be getting when you look something up. However, even though the book starts off with some recipes on working with the DOM and with data types, it’s not a book for Ext JS beginners. If you’re a new comer to Ext JS, you’re better suited by a book like Learning Ext JS.

Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook is really for those Ext JS users who are past the beginner stage and want something on-hand that will help them accomplish tasks they may run into or help them find better solutions to problems they’ve already had. If you work with the Ext JS library as part of your job or use the library a lot, having this book around would probably be beneficial. It’s nicely put together and has a lot of useful information. However, if you’re just a casual user of the Ext JS library, you’d probably find more benefit from an introductory text on the library or from just browsing their online documentation.

Monk-E-God, one of the most prominent figures from the AOL add-on programming scene of the late 90’s, has died.

Initially someone emailed me about “Tom” dying and I had no idea who they were talking about. I’m really bad with names so I always feel a little bad when someone from that era emails me. However, I remembered the “moorpark” location they mentioned and a discussion about it at knk4life.com – and that’s when it hit me that they were talking about Monk-E-God. I remember talking with him at what I think was knk’s old forums (and possibly later GPX’s forums, though I can’t remember if he was a member of that forum) and checking out his work at knk’s website.

I wasn’t really close to the guy, but I remember him as being one of the best programmers from those days. He was one of those people who’s reputation preceded them, it’s really sad to hear he’s gone. Thinking about that era brings back a lot of memories. If it wasn’t for that community and those days on AOL, I wouldn’t have become the programmer I am today.

There’s some more information about him at the digitalgangster.com forums, including a neat story about him meeting the Olsen Twins.

In the back of my mind I had been thinking about putting up some programming quizzes, similar to the ones I used to have on Visual Basic and C++. I was also thinking that it might be cool to have a quiz engine where users could create their own quizzes.

I’m not at that point yet, but this past weekend I decided to take the opportunity to try and learn ExtJS better and put together an interface for the app. You can see an image of the interface to the right or click here to see it in action. It’s pretty basic, but has all the functionality I think I’ll need for now.

The layout is broken into 3 sections. The top section is the header, to the left you can select quiz categories and get book recommendations, and on the right you get a list of quizzes. Hopefully the “Related Reading” panel doesn’t seem too commercial, as it was actually kind of fun to put together. I didn’t want to set myself up for having to write dozens of quizzes, so right now the interface only lists 3 quizzes (which I’ll hopefully have available soon).

Right now I’m in limbo about how complex I want this project to be. I’m not sure if I want users to be able to have accounts, and I’m not sure what data I’d want to store in a database. I’m also wondering if quizzes should be static html pages after they’re created. I’ll figure something out though.

Working with ExtJS was actually a lot of fun, and their online API documentation is fantastic. The library also seems to load rather quickly too. When I worked with Dojo, I was alarmed at the time the page took to load and how it looked while it loaded. I’m still a little bummed about the licensing for ExtJS, but I can live with certain things being GPL’d.