Customer Reviews

Essential GWT: Building for the Web with Google Web Toolkit 2 (Developer's Library)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

"Essential GWT" covers the intermediate to advanced level features of Google's GWT2. While a little time is spent getting the reader set up, it is certainly not aimed at beginners and rapidly dives into the topics that receive inadequate coverage in starter books. There appears to be plenty of confusion about this book, but in my opinion this is caused by assuming that the basic topics will be covered.

I liked it a lot. The prose is easy to read and often amusing and the author is experienced and well aware of the realities and limitations of GWT and doesn't try to over sell the product. Even excluding the value of the technical content this alone makes it easy to consume.

Between the covers lies a wealth of information to help design your next application or improve an existing one. While each chapter covers an important subject, the code samples and best practices are of equal value in boosting the strength of any GWT app. The range of topics covered in the chapters will help elevate your applications to enterprise level stable and mature applications and allow you to apply full testing rigor.

So while I understand the negative comments regarding this book, in my opinion it is an excellent GWT resource provided it is not your first GWT resource.

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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.

I found this book to be exactly what I needed. I was new to GWT and Java but a long time .NET and C programmer. I needed to build a portal with GWT. I had finished the nice tutorial of a Stock Watcher app on the GWT tutorial site and then was left with OK, how do I go about this now for the full fledged app? After a few false starts and reading other peoples source code I came across this book. It was perfect.

I had read through quite a lot of other GWT books and my biggest gripe is that they are horribly out of date. GWT has many changes with the 2.X code releases and books written to the old 1.X versions just didn't hold up. This book gave me everything I could ask for:

1) Relevant to GWT 2.x
2) MVP design pattern. I was ready to move from MVC to MVP and this book used the MVP design pattern.
3) I needed to design a secure portal. This book delivers that example.

I am sure in this brief review I am missing many other good points but I found this book to be worth its weight in gold for a practical design example for someone wanting to go beyond a Hello World application in GWT.

The one thing I recommend is that if you get the book then you should also obtain a copy of the source code. I did find sections of the book that were a bit hard for me to tie together but with the source code and the book side by side it was very easy to understand. In my opinion this book is not for someone who wants a linear experience of reading how to learn GWT programming step by step but is more geared to someone who already has basic GWT experience and now wants to proceed with building an actual useful application.

This is a great book to the advanced concepts of GWT. So many of the mysteries of GWT in JAVA have finally been answered:

--on how the complex file structure of GWT works (all those Project .xml files, packages, etc).
--on how the History management works, and with Parameters (info hard to find on the internet, surprisingly).
--on how Deferred binding works.
--on the intricacies of RPC
--on how actually it is very easy to set up JSNI ( a task that previously intimidated me).

and much more.

The only fault, to me, is that this excellent writer did not go further into some subjects, as he has a wonderful way of creating simple explanations. In every case, his explanations are as clear as possible for the subject matter at hand, which only comes from his own in-depth understanding.

This is definitely a book for intermediate-advanced GWT programmers, and the best one of all such books available today.

Essential GWT is easily the most disorganized book I've ever read. It skips around randomly from one very detailed factoid to another. For example, chapter 3 introduces how to compile the first "hello world" GWT application. This is followed immediately by the intricacies of saving page history and authenticating user logins. I tried to like this book, but I must agree with several other reviewers - just read the Google docs and save your money on this one.

I bought this book because it was the only new book I could find out there using the Model View Presenter pattern for GWT aside from the google tutorials. The author confused the heck out of me! He shows snippets of code from his sample application (he's got 5 versions of the app all in ONE project!) to explain concepts and adds his techniques to it. But I couldn't focus on his writing because there was no "road map" or something for me that I can grasp which made reading this book very, very frustrating. Like the other reviewers have said, he jumps all over the place. I think the book would have been much better if he had taken a step by step (iterative) approach in building his app and explaining the concepts and his own techniques pertaining to only what he would have built so far. Actually, come to think of it..to me it was like a bunch of blog articles on various topics of GWT were just compiled together into a book. I was disappointed as a person trying to get some in depth knowledge of using GWT. Therefore, the google tutorials on GWT unfortunately will be the only source of GWT MVP that I can refer to at this point. If anyone knows of another GWT book that uses MVP...please respond to my comment.

The book is poorly organized and jumps all over the place.
The author fails to follow a continuous thread.
Not only will an intermediate-level programmer befuddled,
but an experienced programmer will also get frustrated.

There are too many detours, good tips and pointers, but completely out of context and jarring to the flow.

I pre-ordered it, got it, spent two days with it and am going to return it.
better stick with Google's docs until a better read comes along.

This is a very disorganized book. I am in Chapter 4, but I still haven't seen a basic GWT application or had the architectural concepts explained. We have, however, seen code generators, deferred binding and other advanced concepts. What a mess. This book jumps around more than a 1970s BASIC program.

The author seems more intent on sharing his knowledge of arcane details than he is on tutoring programmers on how to use GWT. I am an advanced developer, and I am not getting much out of this, so it's time to explore other GWT resources. It's a shame because I sense the author does know the materials - he's just not a writer.

The book is perfect for my needs, none of the introductory stuff that just clutters up pages (that's what the docs are for) and it gets straight down business covering all the advance topics that you'll only find bits and pieces of scattered all over the web.
It also makes for a fantastic reference manual for when you need to do something non-standard with GWT.
This book is not for the beginner although it does cover some topics that might make life easier for the newcomer.

This book has very good content coupled with a very bad title. "Essential GWT" suggests that this book is for learners with no previous knowledge of GWT and that is absolutely not the case. However, if you pay attention to the book description, and already have some working knowledge of GWT, then this book is quite helpful because it provides all kinds of solutions that you can apply to serious enterprise level development. From reading the other reviews I feel that the readers who gave this book a low score were taken in by the title, while the ones who gave this book a high score obviously knew GWT and could benefit from the lessons in it.

A very clear book -- I haven't yet gone through it all, but the MVP and application structuring parts seem to be the best. I'm using the book to help me develop an application. I had plenty Java experience, but this is my first GWT experience. I think this book sets you to use good techniques, and even if it's rather geared to readers who already know GWT, it isn't that hard to understand; it's well explained.