Book review of Kendo UI Cookbook

Last week I did a review of the Kendo UI Cookbook and here are my review comments:

Url: https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/kendo-ui-cookbook

Rating: 4 / 5

Review comments:

If you go over to the Kendo UI site, you can see their awesome demos. But if you want to implement those controls in your project, then there is little help on the Kendo site. They just dump the code with no explanation and you need to be an expert to understand their documentation. There is a huge gap on the Kendo site. This book nicely address that gap. Actually you get more benefit if you use this book in tandem with KendoUI.com. In addition this book goes beyond the typical demos on the Kendo site and provides much more information. It alerts the common gotchas and goes in depth. I believe that the goal of this book is to provide easy to use recipes for complex controls. If this is correct then it did a good justification. 

The good:

• This book provides wealthy of details for each receipe with its "How to do it" and "How it works" sections
• This book even goes one step ahead and provides advance use of the controls with the "There's more" section. Some of these tips are not found on the Kendo site
• This book is a must read if you are building mobile web applications.

  

Nice to Have:

• I would have liked this book more if they used the same demos as on the Kendo site. This helps reader to get a feel of the controls while reading the recipes.
• As AngularJS is gaining popularity, this book should have provide some recipes using Kendo's angular directives

 The bad:

• In my opinion this book fell short of covering the most widely used KendoUI form controls such as DatePickers, textboxes etc.
• This book starts with the complex framework chapter which may scare beginners. If you a beginner, just skip the first chapter
• Sometimes I feel that this book is not properly organized. It does not provide me a story. I believe this is due to the book's goal to cover the complex controls

 Bottom line:

• If you are a UI developer or designer who wants to build web sites with awesome Kendo controls then this book is for you.
• If you are a backend developer and looking to use Kendo form controls then look elsewhere.