Book Review: Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library

Wellman assumes you've never heard of the Yahoo! User Interface library before. He explains that it's a free collection of utilities and controls produced by the developers at Yahoo and designed to help you create front-end user interfaces. After briefly touching on its history, he then explains the library's topography; it consists of four distinct sections containing 33 components (at the time the book was written). As a side note, it's worth mentioning that all the library components are open source, and that Packt Publishing is donating a portion of the profits from the book to the Yahoo! User Interface library project.

After laying out the library components in some detail, Wellman walks you through the basic calendar class, to illustrate the ways you can use and customize that class. This section proved eye-opening, and really illustrated the power of the library to simplify the building of a user interface.

In the second chapter Wellman dived into the CSS tools. If you care about making your web pages look consistent across all browsers, and you use no other part of the YUI library, you will want to use this one. These four tools work together to, in effect, force all browsers to see the same thing when they look at your page, taking away their preconceived notions of how a page should look.

The third chapter covers working with the Document Object Model. After clearly explaining what it is, and showing a traditional example of working with the DOM, Wellman explains how the YUI library makes even this bear of a task a little easier. As with the section on CSS tools, the Yahoo developers who created this approach made sure that thinking about how different browsers handle things doesn't need to be on your list of concerns when coding. And since the DOM and events go hand in hand, Wellman also covers how the YUI library simplifies dealing with the different event models in different browsers.