Synopsis

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD License and are free for all uses.

This book covers all released components whether utility, control, core file, or CSS tool. Methods of the YAHOO Global Object are used and discussed throughout the book. The basics of each control are presented, along with a detailed example showing its use to create complex, fully featured, cross-browser, Web 2.0 user interfaces.

Besides giving you a deep understand of the YUI library, this book aims to expand your knowledge of object-oriented JavaScript programming, as well as strengthen your understanding of the DOM and CSS.

The core aim is to teach you how to create a number of powerful JavaScript controls that can be used straight away in your own applications.

Download

Download the latest YUI version, including full API documentation and more than 250 functional examples from Sourceforge.

The library’s developers blog frequently at the YUI Blog and the YUI Library community exchanges ideas at YDN-JavaScript on Yahoo! Groups.

Book Review

The Yahoo! User Interface Library sits comfortably amongst its peers, which, along with many others, include Prototype, jQuery and Mootools. Arguably it can be said that the YUI library is the king among the JavaScript and CSS-libraries. With a vast number of well documented examples and near 100% compatibility amongst modern browsers, it would be difficult to find a comparable library.

It is one thing to be a well documented library, but it is another to know how to use the libraries to construct a user interface. This is the niche Dan Wellman fills with his book. Although not necessarily for the beginner, since you need a knowledge of CSS, JavaScript and a little AJAX, Wellman does a good job of explaining the concepts, especially AJAX, from scratch.

Wellman provides an A-to-Z of the library and assumes, rightly, that the reader has little or no knowledge of the library. To that effect, he does a long introduction of the YUI, following an overall review of its components, listing them in the first chapter. He then picks up a selection of some of the most established utilities, for example navigation, animation and AJAX utilities and in the following chapters he covers one or two examples for each of them.

Importantly, the book teaches the reader how to not only use the DOM manipulation and event handling aspects of the library, but also the CSS tools of the library.

Wellman does a good job of introducing the technical aspects at the beginning of each chapter, but not dwelling too long before moving on to real usage and methods.

What I would have liked to have seen is more interaction between different components written about in the book. Clearly building a fully-featured application that incorporates most or all of the key components would be unweildy, but individual and isolated examples doesn’t equate real-world scenarios either. For example, it is quite conceivable that autocomplete and drag-and-drop components would be utilised on the same page; it would have been good if Wellman had explained the pains or pitfalls that may be encountered with such combinations. The negativity aside, the examples are of a good quality.

The book does contain a number of errors, but since this is the first edition you can probably forgive the editors from missing them.

A major gripe I have with this book, indeed all technical books is the lack of colour throughout. It is far easier to read and understand the example code when code colouring is employed, allowing for easier understanding of the key elements in the code. Surely modern publishing techniques can mitigate against the extra cost of colour. Indeed, I would pay more for a well-written coloured technical book.

A great summary chapter on graceful degredation versus progressive enhancement would also have been welcomed, since many developers may not consider the usability and accessibility issues of using JavaScript.

This book is certainly a good read for anyone who has basic knowledge of JavaScript, HTML and CSS and who wants to learn how to apply the YUI library in their projects, making them more interactive for the user.

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