It was early 2006, and I was spending many frustrating hours testing and learning many of the frameworks and libraries on the internet. Seemingly, out of nowhere, I stumbled upon an extension to YUI or YUI-ext, developed by an unknown at the time, Jack Slocum.

At last! An Ajax library that was easy to use and well-documented. All of this work was for a small web application that I was developing during a six-month contract. Keep in mind that Enterprise Web 2.0 apps were nonexistent, so I knew I was venturing into uncharted territory.

By late 2006, the project had come to a close, as did the contract, forcing me to reassess my career goals. I had a strong feeling that the Enterprise Rich Intranet Application was going to be very popular, so I decided to become as active as I could in the YUI-ext community, focusing my efforts on learning, implementing, and extending the framework. You could say that I became an evangelist of sorts.

Flash forward to the summer of 2008, when Michael Stephens at Manning Publications contacted me regarding the development of a book for their In Action series. Becoming an author of a book was something that I had never dreamed of.

Before the challenge of this book was presented to me, I had already spent countless hours on the Ext JS forums helping developers like you and me solve a myriad of problems. This was in addition to authoring articles published on various blogs, emagazine articles, and online video tutorials, some of which are longer in duration than most shows on television! So, when Michael Stephens contacted me, I was immediately excited to explore this avenue of knowledge transfer.