Learning Dojo [Paperback]

Peter Svensson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 28, 2008

Learning Dojo gives in-depth as well as practical explanations of using the Dojo AJAX JavaScript Toolkit to create powerful and dynamic websites. This book is for web developers with JavaScript knowledge, who want to use Dojo for developing dynamic Web 2.0 applications. Readers need basic web-page creation skills, HTML and CSS, and should be comfortable with the syntax of JavaScript.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (November 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847192688
• ISBN-13: 978-1847192684
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,177,343 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars welcome to dojo thru code, January 11, 2009

By 

Jeanne Boyarsky (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Learning Dojo (Paperback)

"Learning Dojo" gets you up to speed on using DoJo widgets quickly and efficiently. While the book does cover some advanced JavaScript concepts like closures, you should be comfortable with JavaScript before you start out.

The book was well organized. It starts with the basics of how to use the library and widgets. Later on, internationalization, theme and locales are covered. The example of a basic threading error in AJAX was helpful because it showed WHY approaches wouldn't work. I particularly liked the chart in chapter on with the "selling points" of Dojo.

While I did find one font error (page 28), if this is the biggest error I noticed things are in good shape. There was also a bit of wasted space. For example the almost two pages of character codes (listed one at a time) could have been a table to save space. These are just nits though and don't interfere with readability. And the authors does abbreviate code where possible. The examples build on each other so it isn't too overwhelming reading all that code.

Overall, I did learn a lot from the book. The "real world" examples have a good scope to them - a CRUD example is something many people do! And I really liked the unit testing widget. I learned of several sites to bookmark. Finally, Packt gives some money to the open source project when they sell copies of the book - a very neat concept.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Content OK but get ready for lots of typos and errors, April 1, 2010

By 

Luis Crespo Mejia "Luis" (Barcelona) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Learning Dojo (Paperback)

Yes, this book will fulfill its purpose of teaching you Dojo. However if you are a little perfectionist you may not endure the density of silly mistakes the book contains: typos everywhere, inconsistencies between text that describes code and the code itself... it seems that it was written in one week and then the galley proof phase was skipped.
Also as other review says, it is outdated and for a framework like Dojo that is important.

Not a bad book after all but I would recommend to consider other books of the same subject.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Teaches basic Dojo, but lots of technical and code errors, March 22, 2011

By 

Pantheraleo - See all my reviews

This review is from: Learning Dojo (Paperback)

This book does a reasonable job of teaching the basics of Dojo, but it does have several problems. Most of the examples are are overly simplistic and the book never gives you a very good idea of how to put things together as a whole. There are also multiple mistakes in the code, and some code listings that were incorrectly copy / pasted to the wrong sections of the book.

Also, there are "technical knowledge errors" in some parts of the book. For example, the entire section on closures is basically wrong. Closures in Javascript simply do not work the way the author says they do in this book. Because of this, the code that is written to demonstrate closures actually behaves exactly opposite of the way the author says it will (apparently it was never actually tested). As an example, the author gives the following code:

function foo()
{
var x = 17;
}

foo();

console.log ("x inside foo = " + foo.x);

and claims that it will print "x inside foo = 17" because of the closure.

No, actually it won't. Because that's not how closures in Javascript work. It will print "x inside foo = undefined" because no closure was created, and x is no longer in scope. For a closure to actually be created, something would have to retain a reference to x.

There's another example on closures in the book which also doesn't work correctly either because of incorrect understanding of closures. Once again, apparently this code was never actually tested either.

Overall, this book seems like it was written very quickly, and given inadequate technical review.

Overall, although this book will teach you basic Dojo, I really can't recommend it because of the lack of quality control / technical review. There are better books ou there on Dojo.