The competition for the best Book of Vaadin (TM, Oscar nominee, Patent pending etc) is getting tougher by the day with a newcomer in the books about Vaadin category - this time with PACKT Publishing's Vaadin 7 UI Design by Example.
The book aims to help you as a newcomer to understand the basics of Vaadin and maintain your interest in the subject throughout the book. Mind you, this is no reference manual but a hands-on tutorial for learning Vaadin, written by Alejandro Duarte, a long time Java expert and Vaadin enthusiast. The book covers everything from setting up Eclipse, Netbeans or Maven to feeling sassy about styling and understanding why layouts, components and data binding work in the way they do. And all this through entertaining and descriptive examples, stories, factoids and with a few spoons of positive wackiness sprinkled here and there for that extra crispy flavour. For instance, at one point you start building a board game using the Table component in Vaadin as your board - not the most common way of using the Table component but nonetheless, you learn the tweaks and twists of the table. Note to Rovio and Supercell: Forget about iPads and HTML canvas, Vaadin Table is most definitely the next generation gaming platform.
The author makes the book an interesting read by linking chapters to real world stories from his own developer background as well as spicing up the text with made up dialogs between himself, the author, and you, the reader. So even if you don't have any questions after reading a chapter and everything seems crystal clear, you still end up reading the dialog where you, the reader, are asking questions about things you didn’t know you didn't know. Confusing? Perhaps, but it's a positive berry in the usually too-fact-filled genre of IT books.
If you're a beginner looking to learn Vaadin and you've started doubting JavaDoc as the most pedagogical way of learning an API, then definitely check out Vaadin 7 UI Design by Example by Alejandro Duarte - available as epub, PDF and hardcopy at packtpub.com