Book Image

YUI 2.8: Learning the Library

Book Image

YUI 2.8: Learning the Library

Overview of this book

The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls written in JavaScript for building Rich Internet Applications, across all major browsers and independently of any server technology. There's a lot of functionality baked into YUI, but getting to and understanding that functionality is not for the faint of heart. This book gives you a clear picture of YUI through a step-by-step approach, packed with lots of examples.YUI 2.8: Learning the Library covers all released (non-beta) components of the YUI 2.8 Library in detail with plenty of working examples, looking at the classes that make up each component and the properties and methods that can be used. It includes a series of practical examples to reinforce how each component should/can be used, showing its use to create complex, fully featured, cross-browser, Web 2.0 user interfaces. It has been updated from its first edition with the addition of several chapters covering several new controls and enriched with lots of experience of using them.You will learn to create a number of powerful JavaScript controls that can be used straightaway in your own applications. Besides giving you a deep understanding 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. The final chapter describes many of the tools available to assist you the developer in debugging, maintaining, and ensuring the best quality in your code. In this new edition, all the examples have been updated to use the most recent coding practices and style and new ones added to cover newer components. Since the basic documentation for the library is available online, the focus is on providing insight and experience.The authors take the reader from beginner to advanced-level YUI usage and understanding.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
YUI 2.8 Learning the Library
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Code placement


Good coding practice should always be adhered to, whether designing with the YUI or not. Keeping your JavaScript and CSS code in separate files helps to minimize the initial size of the page so it shows up earlier and also increases the chances of finding the external, common files in the cache. But it does have its downsides too; every file that your page links to adds another HTTP request to the interaction between your visitor and your server, which can result in slower performance. However, as they change far less than the HTML page that uses them, repeated visitors are more likely to have them in their caches.

In real-world implementations, we would always keep as much of our JavaScript and CSS in separate files as possible, keeping a clear distinction between content, behavior, and presentation layers. For the purpose of this book, however, we will be keeping the HTML and JavaScript code in one file. I stress that this is not the correct way to do things and is done purely so that the examples do not become bloated with numerous files.