MooTools 1.2 Beginner’s Guide – book review
Friday, March 12th, 2010 in Mootools, Tools of the trade
As I enjoy using MooTools and since almost all my work here is centered around it, I was pleasantly surprised when Packt Publishing asked me to review “MooTools 1.2 Beginner’s Guide” by Jacob Gube and Garrick Cheung. Now, that I read the book, I must tell you that things would have been a lot easier for me when I started to learn MooTools if I had this book.
One of the main problems with MooTools in my opinion is that entry level is set a bit high and you need some programming knowledge to be able to start learning it. Docs on mootools.net are simply great but in some cases aren’t very helpful, especially if you’re trying to learn the framework. That happens because they assume you already know things that you probably don’t. This usually ends with searching for additional information on different blogs, talking to people, waiting for answers and mainly wasting a lot of time.
Somehow, this book, by using a natural, pleasant tone, helps the reader understand at a basic level what MooTools is and how it can help. Examples are explained step by step (if you have some MooTools knowledge this can be somewhat annoying), there are print screens to see what you should expect for.
The book is structured into 9 chapters taking you from how and where to download MooTools to writing your own plugin, the ultimate goal when using this framework. Every step in between is explained (selectors, moo core, events, Ajax, etc) with examples you can follow and test locally on your computer. All examples provide HTML and CSS markup and are enriched afterwards by using MooTools for effects and different functionality.
On the other hand, by just reading this book, you’ll only be able to understand the basics. For a deeper understanding, you’ll need to do some further reading on your own, search for additional information and ask for details. But if you’re a complete beginner with MooTools, this book is the best starting point you can get (and your next stop should be mootools docs available on mootools.net).
What I liked
I really liked the fact that the book explains things in detail. Most books called Beginner something assume you have some knowledge on the subject. This one indeed says in Preface that the book is geared towards developers having a bit of JavaScript, CSS and HTML understanding, but it does a pretty good job in not taking that as a fact. Examples are explained in detail so one can understand exactly how to use a certain MooTools feature.
One other thing that I liked is the tone and the natural voice the book is written in. It took me just a few hours to read it entirely because of that and I think it helps understanding the examples a lot better than using a technical, cold, neutral tone.
What I disliked
This one is a false/positive because it’s both good and bad.The book only scratches the surface, explains the basics without trying to detail things; it doesn’t say what advantages come from using MooTools over other JavaScript framework, how it helps write clean, easy to read code. As I said previously, this is both good and bad. Good because if you would detail all that, being a beginner book it will certainly scare any newcomer from choosing this framework, bad because you can’t really understand only from this book what you can do and how far you can take MooTools.
Buy MooTools 1.2 Beginner’s Guide | Sample chapter: Working with Events | Table of Contents
