One of the things I highly encourage you to do when you are learning a new library or platform is explore. Sure, you can go step by step and learn the basics – gradually building up your skills till you can do complext widgets using mixins, plugins, blah blah blah. But that’s like going to a party, and only getting to the cake 5 mins before the party is over. You should take a few days to just mess around with the YUI api. This is where Firebug or Chrome Inspector + Y.log() is your friend.

SimpleYUI

They also have a new buddy called SimpleYUI. SimpleYUI is like getting one of those cheese samplers in the mail. You dont have to go for a big commitment, but you can try out a lot of things without worrying about a lot of the safeguards you might later want to have. I have created a landing page for SimpleYUI, but in summary its like getting to play with YUI without worrying about all that .use() stuff, or anonymous functions, etc. It’s a lot like how you might have experienced jQuery for the first time. You get a lot of powerful functionality up front, and you only need a single js + a few lines of code to get started. For some great examples, check out this page from Eric Miraglia. SimpleYUI gives you DOM, Events (and custom events!!!) transitions, and AJAX. It’s perfect for folks who just want to add some animations or fun effects for your site in no time flat.

YUI API

To get into the api, you have to locations to check out. One is the main YUI site itself. Go dig around the examples for anything you like, and try things out. The second is the API Spec page, which is this sorta sparse, dry description of each api feature. You’ll find that you spend a lot of time going back to that page.

jsFiddle

From there, I have a quick trick for you. Go to jsFiddle.net and create a template page with SimpleYUI included (or just use the default YUI that is already there). From there you can play with HTML, JS, CSS and use firebug or the chrome inspector to Y.log() your tests out. Here’s an example using SimpleYUI as a custom added javascript library.

I encourage you to do this because you will begin to get a feel for how things work, and building up a collection of these “fiddles” will stand you in good stead when you want to go back and look up some tip or trick that you’ve learned.