Generally, I think this book is amazing. It covers almost all of the public (API) aspects of Moo in passing but with enough depth so the developer reading is comfortable figuring out any unclear aspects on his own. It clears up possibly confusing topics (the difference between $merge and $extend, for instance) and goes over classes and inheritance pretty well. The "real world examples" are handy to refer to in a pinch, too!

MooTools Essentials finally gives some real credibility by way of a book to this great framework and it's written by one of the best contributors to MooTools.

Including writing this book, Aaron has written one of the best MooTools extensions called ClientSide. He has also written the reference documentation on the MooTools site and the best online tutorial for learning mootools at clientside.cnet.com.

Not only that, Aaron is the most responsive web personality I've ever communicated with. Both me and a colleague have made suggestions to clientside and to this book (we received the online version) and he made bufixes and corrections almost instantly and where he didn't, he provided detailed reasons why not.

The book follows an easy step by step approach to learning the framework where each chapter builds on the previous one. He uses excellent real world examples on, amongst other things, the steps one would take to create a MooTools class. The how-I-would-do-it type approach to teaching in that section is one of the best and most practical ways to teaching I've seen. It immediately answers many questions, some which I would never have thought to ask.

Okay, this sounds like a paid advertisement almost but I'm just really impressed by the book and by Aaron's contributions especially.

If you are interested in the most underrated JavaScript framework on the Internet, this is the best book to learn it from.

Ordered the book as soon as it came out, and have been reading it regularly ever since. It does a great job of both introducing the concepts to those who are new to the framework, as well as describing those subtle touches that make Mootools such a powerful development platform. Full of great (and light-hearted) code examples, as well as many useful tables and charts. And to top it off, the book is offered at a great price. Moo.

Having had experience with both Prototype and jQuery, this book actually made me a MooTools convert. Loaded with great examples, detailed explanations of each and every class and method in the library, and extremely insightful comments and tips on how and when to use use them.

Of particular interest to me were the chapters dedicated to writing classes in MooTools, as well as the last sections which lead the reader through the complete life cycle of creating reusable components. Most importantly, the thought process involved in adding each layer of complexity which helps one understand things which in other books are just a "given". I found myself saying several times: Oh! so _that's_ why they do that!

Even the appendixes are packed with clear explanations of core JavaScript concepts which are tricky and somewhat hard to grasp for the novice (bindings, closures, etc.)

The only inconvenience I found to the book was an extremely large font (at least on the PDF version, not sure about the hardcopy) which made reading code a tad obtrusive at times. Other than that, a must-have for any MooTools developer and a definite recommendation for those initiating themselves in JavaScript frameworks.