Book feedback for Ext.NET Web Application Development

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  1. #31
    I found the book to be quite light but comprehensive in terms of understanding that wide variety of extjs controls and features. But I found it sadly insufficient when it came to really giving a hard discourse on layout topics.

    Granted, the various Panels is an important set of controls to go over, but layouts are far more subtle and important to making sure users can even begin to quickly prototype any applications that use controls. If they get caught up just trying to get controls to appear, it will cause a lot of frustration and abandonment of the technology.

    It's taken me a great deal of time to understand and address resize subjects. I had to breakdown and spend some time really realizing that there are two sets of attributes with every container. Some attributes affect the outer area and communicate up with the parent (Flex, column, row, ...) and other attributes that apply to the contents and its children (layout, body*, etc). I believe it is most important to start your communication with the reader here and explain these subjects in detail.

    The LayoutConfig is also critical in this discourse.

    I realize Chapter 3 does a lot to discuss the different types, but I would not start with borderlayout or anchor. Even though it's a great "hello world" starting point, they are still, more or less, specialized container with a lot of overhead that all the other standard UI will not necessarily use.

    Everything in extjs is based around containers and unless you have a FIRM grasp on how to use them with the layouts like none, Vbox, Hbox, column, row, form, and maybe table, you're not even able to develop anything else in extjs imho. Spend more time on those layouts instead of Border, especially where it comes to nested examples with varying content size requirements, and things like Window will become very clear with minimal explanation. As will border, and anchor, and all the other special panels.

    EDIT: Add some paragraph breaks
    Last edited by geoffrey.mcgill; Jun 06, 2013 at 5:03 AM.
  2. #32
    Quote Originally Posted by michaeld View Post
    I found the book to be quite light but comprehensive in terms of understanding that wide variety of extjs controls and features. But I found it sadly insufficient when it came to really giving a hard discourse on layout topics.

    Granted, the various Panels is an important set of controls to go over, but layouts are far more subtle and important to making sure users can even begin to quickly prototype any applications that use controls. If they get caught up just trying to get controls to appear, it will cause a lot of frustration and abandonment of the technology.

    It's taken me a great deal of time to understand and address resize subjects. I had to breakdown and spend some time really realizing that there are two sets of attributes with every container. Some attributes affect the outer area and communicate up with the parent (Flex, column, row, ...) and other attributes that apply to the contents and its children (layout, body*, etc). I believe it is most important to start your communication with the reader here and explain these subjects in detail.

    The LayoutConfig is also critical in this discourse.

    I realize Chapter 3 does a lot to discuss the different types, but I would not start with borderlayout or anchor. Even though it's a great "hello world" starting point, they are still, more or less, specialized container with a lot of overhead that all the other standard UI will not necessarily use.

    Everything in extjs is based around containers and unless you have a FIRM grasp on how to use them with the layouts like none, Vbox, Hbox, column, row, form, and maybe table, you're not even able to develop anything else in extjs imho. Spend more time on those layouts instead of Border, especially where it comes to nested examples with varying content size requirements, and things like Window will become very clear with minimal explanation. As will border, and anchor, and all the other special panels.

    EDIT: Add some paragraph breaks
    We appreciate the feedback.

    Each of the chapters of the book could easily be expanded into their own dedicated book. Layouts is a big topic and the publisher provided approx 30 pages to get the message across. Obviously that's not a lot of space to dive too far into the nuances of various Layout configs.

    The Viewport + BorderLayout was chosen as the first Layout because it's almost always the first place developer start when building an Ext.NET App. The combination almost always provides the core/base Layout for all Ext.NET Apps.

    In retrospect, it would have been nice to devote a little more space to HBox and VBox Layouts. They're very critical to all Ext.NET Apps. The following two samples from the Examples Explorer are a good place to review HBox and VBox config options.

    https://examples2.ext.net/#/Layout/HBoxLayout/Basic/
    https://examples2.ext.net/#/Layout/VBoxLayout/Basic/

    A general comment to keep in mind, this book was positioned as an "introduction" to Ext.NET application development. We hoped to provide enough of an overview and introduction for developers to get up and running quickly with as many tips, tools and links we could fit in to point you in the right direction for more advanced topics.

    Throughout the writing of the book, we regularly made comments regarding how certain chapters (even sub-topics within a chapter) should be their own book. There's a lot to write about, and hopefully over time we (or other authors/publishers) will be able to pick off a few more subjects.

    Thanks again for the feedback.
    Geoffrey McGill
    Founder
  3. #33
    I'm beyond the basics at this point. I saw that feedback was solicited so I gave my 2 cents on the topic I had the hardest time with. I anticipated and understand your decision to focus on borderlayout but I find borderlayout slightly deceiving as a layout control because it's internal panels already have basic layout features out of the box.

    The examples you listed in the example explorer are excellent for basic understanding of the subtle differences with sizing, stretching, and positioning, but the use of buttons internally to represent the behavior instead of internal containers with their own internal input controls is slightly confusing for first timer who probably will jump right into building an application with multiple nested containers and go "huh?". Buttons typically are considered input controls, and though they too can be sized in extjs, it's not intuitive why someone would want to do such a thing right away, but it is intuitive why you would a panel. It doesn't naturally follow for the beginner how the same approach applies for panels which need to apply 2 sets of attributes towards communicating with its parent while others apply directly to their children. You really need a depth of 3 to "really" get it and the examples that show these features off only have 2. I know it confused me for a long time until I came up with my own examples and tried various techniques. Maybe I'm alone here. You guys live-breath this stuff so all I can do is share my experience on the one topic that caused me the highest learning curve because I found nothing online that really helped me. Anyway, I don't expect this to change but it couldn't hurt to have one more example in the explorer that shows containers controlling layouts of containers and their children. It may help save some time for the next guy. All I can do is pose the idea.

    Again, the book does what you said it should. It was a great primer.
  4. #34
    Hi all,

    Sorry I've been a bit late in replying. Thanks for the valuable feedback and constructive criticism.

    About MVC vs WebForms: I agree with Geoff that many still use WebForms. However, the other interesting thing I find myself increasingly doing with Ext.NET is trying to follow component/object oriented best practices with Ext.NET to the extent that there is hardly much to put on the markup pages itself, in effect meaning the choice of using WebForms or MVC (or both!) almost doesn't matter (... almost!). And for me, Ext.NET "fixes" my personal annoyances with WebForms (i.e. the PostBack model) because the AJAX options are so extensive :)

    In effect, doing more in C# and JavaScript to create custom plugins or custom components the markup layer then becomes extremely thin. That being said, I appreciate that is not always necessary to go to that level of encapsulation.

    The other practical thing was as I was writing the book (early half of 2012) the Ext.NET team were busy adding a lot more superior features to MVC. For that reason, and for consistency with the examples explorer we felt most examples could be in WebForms with a few MVC examples where possible and useful. That being said, any future book would certainly put more emphasis on MVC than on Web Forms.

    Regarding layout: it is a fair point about using other containers rather than buttons for the HBox layout. As Geoff noted, there was really limited space for most of these chapters, so I opted to reuse the example in the Examples Explorer and try to explain it a bit. The Examples Explorer itself reproduces Sencha's own example from their examples explorer which helps with consistency/cross-over from pure Ext JS into Ext.NET. That being said, it is a good suggestion to show other containers inside HBox/VBox layouts.

    Finally, it was quite difficult at times to decide what content to keep/cut/minimize due to the publisher's page count limits. So, as well as helping readers get started, one of my additional goals was to help readers learn how to help themselves, too. For that, and where I had no choice but to cut or limit material, I tried hard to provide links to further reading materials to follow on and to encourage readers to also learn more about Ext JS itself (as some of the content I could have written would have been an overlap of Ext JS, which would require at least another book!). All that said, I hope you find some useful advanced topics in there (e.g. chapter 9 and the bit about MVC there was a great learning experience for me, too).

    But thanks for the feedback. It is definitely useful and appreciated.
  5. #35
    Reading the book some parts are not clarified for me. Where can I bring up that matters to be clarified.
  6. #36
    Quote Originally Posted by Elman View Post
    Reading the book some parts are not clarified for me. Where can I bring up that matters to be clarified.
    Hi,

    It might be best to create a new thread in the general Help forums, then post a link in this thread to that new thread tying the two together.

    This thread has focused mostly on general book comments, so it's probably good to keep specific issues in there own thread.

    Hope this helps.
    Geoffrey McGill
    Founder
  7. #37
    Quote Originally Posted by geoffrey.mcgill View Post
    Hi,

    It might be best to create a new thread in the general Help forums, then post a link in this thread to that new thread tying the two together.

    This thread has focused mostly on general book comments, so it's probably good to keep specific issues in there own thread.

    Hope this helps.
    Thanks a million Geff
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