Customer Reviews

Learning Dojo

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"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.

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Also as other review says, it is outdated and for a framework like Dojo that is important.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.

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.

I really enjoyed this book. It hit on a lot of topics that kind of surprised me. I starting reading many sections in the book and thought "wow, what a great idea for a technical book". It could have been something small like the depth of the introduction chapters or something larger like the chapter on AOL and Googls Content Delivery Network (CDN). I guess my point is, this book was an excellent tool and resource to learn Dojo - it covered everything I was hoping for and then some. I have already used the book as a reference a couple of times - whether it was for a URL or a snippet - which the samples are excellent. I found the code snippets very helpful, they are very realistic and easy to follow. There is a small chapter on Dojo Objective Harness and while it gave a good primer I wanted to see a little bit more.

In short, I highly recommend anyone wanting to learn Dojo to check this book out and make it part of their collection. I have the eBook version and I found it very easy to read.

This book was a pretty nice overview of the "what's" and "how's." It's a bit dated on the version now, using 1.1 to 1.2RC1 (2008) ... now, (2009) the version I'm using is 1.3.2. There are some differences, but the book still served to give me a good idea of what I could do and how to go about doing them. I liked it.