As we mentioned in a recent "In the Wild" post, the first book dedicated solely to YUI has hit the shelves: Dan Wellman's Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library from Packt Publishing.

Dan takes on a broad subset of topics in this volume. Dan and the team at Packt were kind enough to let us share a sample chapter with you here to give you a sense of Dan's approach to YUI — an approach that emphasizes clear explanations, practical examples, and lots of sample code. In this sample, Dan explores Thomas Sha's YUI Connection Manager (our wrapper for XHR/Ajax) and shows you how to build both a News Reader application and Login application. This should give you a good flavor for what the remainder of the book holds:

• "Ajax and Connection Manager", by Dan Wellman; from Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library pp. 103-126.

In the book, Dan covers the following outline in his tour of YUI:

• 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

We've got our first few copies going around here among the YUI development team and it's been a great pleasure to see the care and thought Dan and Packt put into the volume. The book can be ordered directly from Packt in bound or e-book form. It's also available from Amazon.