greengecko design

So I finally finished reading Jay Larry G. Johnston's book Mootools 1.3 Cookbook. First I should disclose a few biases I have.

1. I am much more of a "roll-up-my sleeves, jump into something new, try until I fail, then google it" kind of learner Rarley do I use books for technical reference... and I almost never read them cover-to-cover as I have this one
2. I have not used MooTools in quite a while.. I switched to jQuery back when I switched to drupal as a CMS
3. Although I do not get "religious" about my choice of javascript framework (or operating system, or phone etc) I do prefer MooTools (though I respect and like jQuery). jQuery and MooTools are a little like Windows and Apple (respectively). They both appeal to the designer in me. Apple tends toward minimalism and ease-of-use. After having used both jQuery and MooTools for a few years each I feel like there are just some things that are syntactically more elegent in MooTools. But MooTools and Apple are used by the few who are generally very strong in their opinion of the product's superiority, while Windows and jQuery are the most widely used option their respective fields. And while I am not knocking either Windows or jQuery, that is the reason I ended up using both.

As for the book - Jay's quirky sense of humor comes though and is, dare I say it, perhaps even more cheesy than my own (although my cheesy sense of humor does not come though in my blog posts so you'll just have to take my word for it.

I felt like it had many good examples and while I only had a preview PDF version of the book, the real gold for any newbie will be to have the example files to get some hands-on experience along-side the book's explanations. I think that is where the real aha moments will come in.

Jay covers a good range from entry-level recipes to more in-depth class driven examples that will help to edify a MooTooler throughout the whole learning process. I do have to say that he uses eval a lot more loosly than I do (I reserve it for situations where there is simply no alternative). But overall I would recommend this book to somebody who is looking to learn MooTools and who learns well via books.