Everyone using google chrome browser probably uses some extensions as well. I personally use mail checker, Hola and ad-blocker. To be honest, I have never been never thinking how these extensions were made, until I have noticed the book “Creating Google Chrome Extensions” by Prateek Mehta. Thus, I have asked Apress.com to provide me the book for a review and they kindly did it.
The book is really compact – 162 pages, 4 chapters. It starts from the very beginning of extensions, the AB and C. I really liked the first chapter – there were given real examples how to make a simple extension, showing the clock and pointing out important pitfalls one can make (e.g. do not put comments in the manifest file), while building an extension. Thus, after reading this chapter I have decided to search a bit more on the topic and with the help of another resource I have built my first extension – an extension, showing the last ten news from the blog feed. I have even paid 5 USD to Google to register me as a developer, so my extension is available for everybody through the Google Web Store. 🙂 However, the point is that the first chapter really made me enthusiastic and I liked it a lot.
In the second chapter the book builds various extensions, some of which could be useful – I liked BrowserActionNotes – an extension which gives you the chance to write a note about the web page you are visiting.
Chapter 3 takes a look into the APIs that you can use in the book.
In chapter 4 you learn how to override new tab, providing options page and to create themes.
Prerequisite for reading the book is good Web knowledge (JS, HMTL, CSS). The book gives 100% of its source code available for free in the site of apress.com.
If I have to summarize – the book is well written and it got my interest into Chrome extensions. That’s all needed to be said to justify a 5 star mark! Good job!