Learning Dojo (Paperback)

~ Peter Svensson (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

In Detail

Dojo is a popular AJAX-specific open-source JavaScript framework for building powerful web applications. It provides a well conceived API and set of tools to assist you and fix the issues experienced in everyday web development. Your project size is no concern while using Dojo. It is the best scalable solution to all your size-related issues.

This book starts by giving you tips and tricks for programming with JavaScript. These tricks will help you with Dojo. With every chapter, you will learn advanced JavaScript techniques. You will learn to leverage Dojo for a clean web application architecture using JSON or XML.

What you will learn from this book?

• Learn tips and tricks in JavaScript that will help you get better at coding in Dojo
• Explore Dijits (Dojo Widgets) with examples so that you can write your own Dijits
• Serialize, automatically validate, and convert entered content with forms and layouts
• Organize different kinds of data in the same Dijit using dojo.data for a better look and feel to your website
• Animate your content using dojo.fx to give your pages a dynamic look and feel
• Use closures and Dojo's Class-based OO system underlying all widgets and features
• Use powerful formatting for Dates and Currencies between locales
• Understand Dojo's event system, for classical browser events, function 'advice', and Dojo's publish/subscribe message bus
• Learn to create dynamic Tree widgets using data sources, custom styling, and even drag and drop
• Create custom widgets and reusable components that use all of Dojo's advanced layout managers and widgets
• Learn to write custom PHP services to feed data to Dojo's client-side data- driven components

Approach

The book is an example-based tutorial. Once the basics are done, it takes the reader through creating a number of examples, each focussed on a different interface task or visual effect.

Who this book is written for?

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 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #450,607 in Books (See Bestsellers 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

"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.

4.0 out of 5 stars Good quick Dojo overview, October 17, 2009

By	Todd Mullen (DC area) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

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.