"Ext JS 4 First Look" and "Mastering Ext JS" - book review

Hello. In this post I shall explain my thoughts on two books, Ext JS 4 First Look and Mastering Ext JS written by loiane Groner.

Ext JS 4 First Look

It is an intruductory book for Ext JS 4 framework, specifically version 4.2. You can find lot of comments and posts across the Internet about previous version of Ext JS 4, 4.0 and 4.1, it is said that were buggy. So my advice is use Ext JS 4.2 for your future projects. Not sure about Ext JS 5, it is a new release.

In about 300 pages Loiane managed to cover all aspects of Ext JS 4 framework. It has lot of useful information and you can get a general understanding about the framework's capabilities. However is a bit techincal, so I recommend reading each chapter at least twice. It also a good practice to try and write the code from the book on the a real machine and see how it works. From this point of view I think it needs more code examples. So if you want to learn Ext JS 4 framework, I think this book is a good start. 4/5

Mastering Ext JS

In this second book about Ext JS 4 you get to develop real world Ext JS 4 based application (using sakila sample database). It has lot of code and reading it is a bit dificult task since you need to understand what the code does. While reading it I set up my working environment and started coding from the book. It begins ok, all things that were necessary were covered in the book. However when you get deep into it like 150 pages which is middle of the book, you can clearly see that some application modules are not finished, or a code is missing. I managed to find code base here. It easens up things a little, if you copy code form github. But I also found that some php files had commented code and weren't working. It has a bit of inconsistency with the book. You get the feeling it is not made for beginner web developer :) I managed to find solutions to most of the problems while developing my practice app here: http://masteringextjs-practices.rhcloud.com/ but that was the case because I already knew PHP 5, firebug, MVC architecture, Aptana, JavaScript basics, html etc...

- still in development. Use vlado as user and 123456 as password to log in. You can change to different language, now English US and MK(Macedonian) available. If you get loading errors or it doesn't want to show up, refresh the tab. Still things to be done. 

Notes: 

• Some php file had commented code out in the github package. Why should I bother understanding what the php code does when I learn Ext JS?

• It happened to build a production version of the app and when uploaded to server it doesn't work as it works locally. Charts aren't drawn, login window stays after loging in, loading notification stays forever.  Not sure why it does that, a testing is neccesarry. Ok I set up Siesta as mentioned in chapter 12 - Debugging and Testing, I run the test from the book and get error Application.js not found in Firebug. :) Ok I deployed (prebuild app) masteringextjs4 zip package from github to my server and try the tests, some strange error appears, "j is undefined" :D So now I cannot test even the prebuilt application. Maybe I have missed to read some guide or whatever, but overall I am a bit lost as Ext JS beginner.

I give points for ingenuity. Really good use of available learning resources like Sakila sample database. You will get to work with MySQL db, MySQL Workbench, exporting/importing data. Also PhpMyAdmin which is a really good admin tool.

All in all it is a good book, but you will not learn much if you don't code the code yourself and try to debug yourself. It is very techincal and as I said cover each chapter twice. Once reading, once, coding. It contains lot of general information about Ext JS 4 and lot of advices about tools to develop. According to my experience reading it I give it 3.75/5