In Detail 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 will be 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 will expand your knowledge of object-oriented JavaScript programming, as well as strengthen your understanding of the DOM and CSS. You will learn to create a number of powerful JavaScript controls that can be used straight away in your own applications. What you will learn from this book?

• Explore the YUI Library--utilities, controls, core files, and CSS tools

• Install the library and get up and running with it

• Handle DOM manipulation and scripting

• Get inside Event Handling with YUI

• Create consistent web pages using YUI CSS tools

• Work with Containers--implementation, skinning, adding transitions, and tabs

• Debug, maintain, and update applications with the Logger control

• Examples included in the book:

• Calendar interface

• Autocomplete

• Creating panels

• Dialogs

• Custom tooltips

• Forms

• Split button

• TreeView Control

• Browser History Manager with Calendar

• Simple animation

• Custom animation

• Creating tabs and adding content dynamically

• Dragging and dropping

• Implementing sliders

• Logger at work

• Logging custom classes

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 11 Ratings

Great Book on YUI Library - 2008-08-02
Reviewer Rating:
The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a free resource provided by Yahoo! for web developers. It's a collection of utilities that enable developers to build cross-browser web applications quickly and easily. This library has been around for a few years now and is very extensive. It contains utilities, components, controls (widgets), and CSS tools. This can be very confusing for the developer who has no previous experience with using these types of tools. Even though Yahoo! has some very good online documentation, it still can be difficult to get started using some of these many online tools.

Dan Wellman really explains the main core components of YUI Library very well and would be very helpful to anybody wanting to quickly get started using the YUI.

Dan starts off with a great overview of YUI, with some simple examples. Then in the next chapter (2), the author goes into the CSS tools that it provides to help the develop create consistent web pages of layout and design. The next chapter (3), explains many of the DOM and Event manipulation classes that are provided. This is a very useful chapter because many web pages that use JavaScript require manipulation of web elements on the page. Using many the DOM methods in YUI make it very easy to access any element on a web page.

Continuing with the book, Dan then focuses on the Ajax and Connection Manager classes. Ajax has almost become the defacto-standard of displaying and access data on a web page and using classes explained in this chapter make it very easy to understand many of the useful examples the author use such as a log-in page, newsreaders, etc. I was able to following along very easily and create similar examples based upon the author's explanations.

The rest of the book goes into many of the other useful classes such as: Animation, Buttons, Navigation Trees, Content Containers, and Drag-andDrop, and Auto-complete. You can create almost any type of web interface from the components that are explained from this great book.

If there is one library you use, it should be the YUI Library because it is backed by Yahoo! so you know it is not going anywhere and fully tested and this should be your book that you buy to truly understand it.

A great buy!

A good investment for serious web developers - 2008-07-10
Reviewer Rating:
Learning the Yahoo! User Interface library
Dan Wellman clearly knows the YUI. I had a problem with one of his examples, and sent an email to the publisher. Dan replied with an answer and later responded to direct questions. It is refreshing to find an author who will communicate with the reader on that level,

I found this book to be a good introduction to the Yahoo User Interface with examples on its use. However, it is lacking detailed information on the classes and their methods. Having said that, Yahoo has done a good job of giving the world a decent open source library that makes many of the tedious tasks less painful. Dan Wellman has done a good job on giving us a look into how to utilize a portion of this library.

Front-end developers will reap the greatest benefit provided they have a basic understanding of OOP and JavaScript. To quote the author, "Trying to learn how to make use of the YUI without first knowing about the JavaScript language itself... is an endeavor likely to end in frustration and disappointment."

This book is a good investment for any serious web developer.

Learning the Yahoo! User Interface library - 2008-07-07
Reviewer Rating:
It wastes money to buy this book because material on the book very likely come from compiling source from Web. Also A lot of examples on the book don't work. No much work from the author. Reading YUI document is beter than this book. So, I give 1 start. Learning the Yahoo! User Interface library

Good supplement to online material - 2010-05-31
Reviewer Rating:
Learning the Yahoo UI is a good book to supplement the online content already available on develop.yahoo.com.

I would consider myself an intermediate developer when it comes to javascript. I searched for this book originally because I felt the online samples on yahoo's site were still so limited and brief in detail of usage. Dan details the usage in a way which is easier to digest but still informative. Bit wordy in places, but this doesn't detract from the books overall effectiveness.

This book is written for earlier the version of 2.x of YUI, (it was written in 2008 and version 2 was the most current at the time).

Despite it's age the most recent 2.x version, (2.8r4) still works quite well. There are some deprecated methods, but you should be able to get around this without too much trouble.

Some have said there are many errors in the book. That's not my experience, just a few typo's here and there but nothing you can't work out for yourself when you find them

But overall, it's a good book for version 2.x of YUI that helps you get your head around parts which aren't well documented online.

Would be superb if it weren't for..... - 2009-12-27
Reviewer Rating:
This has the potential for being a superb tutorial on YUI. HOWEVER, there are so many typos, errata not identified, errata on the website with errata. If you know enough to fix the author's basic code, it becomes a handy intro to the features of YUI.

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