Editorial Reviews:
Dojo offers Web developers and designers a powerful JavaScript toolkit for rapidly developing robust Ajax applications. Now, for the first time, there?s a complete, example-rich developer?s guide to Dojo and its growing library of prepackaged widgets. Reviewed and endorsed by the Dojo Foundation, the creators of Dojo, this book brings together all the hands-on guidance and tested code samples you need to succeed. Expert Web developer James E. Harmon begins by demonstrating how to ?Ajax-ify? existing applications and pages with Dojo, adding Ajax features such as client- and server-side validation as quickly and nondisruptively as possible. Next, he presents in-depth coverage of Dojo?s user interface, form, layout, and specialized Widgets, showing how they work and how to use them most effectively. Among the Widgets, he covers in detail: Date Pickers, Rich Text Editors, Combo Boxes, Expandable Outlines, and many others. In conclusion, Harmon introduces the Dojo toolkit?s powerful capabilities for simplifying Ajax development. He thoroughly explains Dojo?s helper functions, shortcuts, and special methods, illuminating each feature with examples of the JavaScript problems it can solve. This section?s far-ranging coverage includes strings, JSON support, event handling, Ajax remoting, Dojo and the DOM, testing, debugging, and much more. All source code examples are provided on a companion Web site, including source code for a complete tutorial case study application.
Customer Reviews:
Displaying 1 to 5 of 7 total reviews (Page 1 of 2):
 A powerful tool packed with shortcuts and special methods for handling JavaScript problems
Dojo offers web developers and designers a fine JavaScript tool for developing Ajax applications, and here's a developer's technical guide to Dojo and its growing applications. Chapters come from an expert Web designer and focus on tweaking existing applications and pages using Dojo, adding Ajax features and Dojo's user interface, and showing how to use its components effectively. The result is a powerful tool packed with shortcuts and special methods for handling JavaScript problems, making for a powerful reference recommended for any applications library.
 Good Intro
This is a nice intro. It is in three parts and runs a little contrary to the normal flow in a book like this. The first section is a hands on tutorial, the middle section is reference and the last section contains definitions, more of an introduction and information on using capabilities that are not tied to widgets.
There's a sentence in chapter 15 that mentions using widgets later. This makes me think that editors moved around the order of the book - because in most computer books the stuff in the third section would be first.
I personally liked this change. It got me in and running immediately on using some code. I didn't need to work through a bunch of explanation first. The widget documentation is o.k. I guess, though not really necessary. I would have enjoyed more in depth examples and explanations.
I think this book would best serve someone new to javascript and libraries of this type. It gives enough to help a beginner get going and be immediately successful, so that they don't give up. A more experienced developer might be frustrated with the repetition between the sections and the high-level overview on most material.
But for anyone who wants to learn a new technology and doesn't want to get bogged down in a massive volume that covers every single bit of minutiae - this is a good start. A very good Dojo book
This is a very good introduction to Dojo. If you have not used any other Ajax toolkit, and you want to learn Dojo, then this is the book for you. At the moment, this is the easiest to understand tutorial of Dojo. Unfortunately, it does not tackle DojoX very much, which contains some modules that are very useful, like the Grid. It also doesn't show examples of handling XML (handleAs: "xml"). Anyway, the perfect companion to this book, like other Dojo books, is the Book of Dojo, found in Dojo's website.  Good to get you started but there are some issues
The book is a good book on getting you stated in Dojo and the examples are good. The book though seems a bit rushed to market there is errors in the code everywhere I seen typos to just completly wrong code in the book. I would have rated this higher but the errors are a problem if you try and follow the code in the book. My suggestion is you need to download the code from the authors website. Follow that code instead. I have read the other dojo books and they have a simular problem. Dojo is very powerful and there just isn't very many people to review the books for mistakes. If you looking for documentaion on Dojo and you do a lot of server side programming then it is worth buying this book as it was meant for you.. 3 dojo books in one
"Dojo: Using the Dojo JavaScript Library to Build Ajax Application" is a book for developers. You should know JavaScript and HTML well before starting. There are three main sections of the book which were so different to the point where I thought I was reading three separate books.
The first part rips apart an HTML form then shows how to use Dojo to improve it. I liked the attention to accessibility along with error handling and validation. Dojo was introduced in pieces through example. Except for a couple overly long examples, such as a full page of the HTML source for the 50 states, this section was good. Things build up slowly and clearly so long as you are willing to suspect disbelief about how Dojo works.
The second part introduces Dojo widgets with a picture, API description and examples. Except for the picture, it seemed very similar to the API. This part of the book didn't add much value for me as I can look at the API and examples online.
The third part gets good again. It goes into the details of how Dojo works and some more advanced concepts. It also goes into history and the problems Dojo solves. It was nice having this later in the book so the beginning could be more substantial. I did like how the author went from high level to low level - both with the three parts and even within part three itself. Some pieces stayed a bit to high level such as the AOP and object discussion chapters.
Overall, I was mixed between the three books. The first and third were good and the second I wouldn't pay for. More Customer Reviews:
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