Dojo: The Definitive Guide

by Matthew A. Russell

Book Overview

Of all the Ajax-specific frameworks that have popped up in recent years, one clearly stands out as the industrial strength solution. Dojo is not just another JavaScript toolkit--it's the JavaScript toolkit--and Dojo: The Definitive Guide demonstrates how to tame Dojo's extensive library of utilities so that you can build rich and responsive web applications like never before. Dojo founder Alex Russell gives a foreword that explains the "why" of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596516487
• ISBN13: 9780596516482
• Release Date: July 2008
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 486 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

This book has become my Dojo bible

I tried really hard to get into Dojo without any reference guides, but really struggled. Then I bought this book. It's become my Dojo bible. I use it every day. It's not going to give you every example of how to do everything you want in every area of Dojo, but that makes sense. Dojo is huge. What it does, instead, is give a good detailed look at just about every area of Dojo - certainly enough to get you started and figure the rest out on your own. Plus it explains some theory behind why things are the way they are. For example, there is no full demo of creating a complex drag and drop script, but there is coverage of every fundamental drag and drop building block available. Combine that with some online examples and you can do exactly what you want. There's really nothing left to the imagination in terms of what Dojo can do once you've read this book. It has become an essential reference guide for me in writing a seperate open source telephony project. Highly recommended.

An excellent introduction which covers all 1.x versions and offers plenty of examples and tested cod

Any computer library strong in web development will find DOJO: THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE an excellent introduction which covers all 1.x versions and offers plenty of examples and tested code sets. From customizing Dojo to overseeing developers using Dojo in larger settings, this offers the programmer/manager a set of keys to working efficiently with Dojo to produce superior layouts and web applications. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

A must Have for Dojo Developers

This book is an outstanding resource for anyone who plans to work with the Dojo Toolkit. Dojo is my personal favorite toolkit for JavaScript development. This book really helps to explain not only the "how to" of Dojo but also the "how come". It is a great reference for Dojo's core functionality, for Dojo's Dijit widgeting system and for the Dojo build system and test harness. It gives great practical advice on how to exploit the power of dojo.query, and provides great coverage of Dojo's data stores for data source abstraction. It has excellent coverage of dojo.fx for animations, it provides an invaluable desktop reference for Dijit. There is also a excellent coverage Dojo's Data Transport apis like XmlHttpRequest, dojo.io.script(Dynamic Script Tag injection for JSONP or JSON with a check string mechanism), as well as the use of iframes for data transport. If you are working with Dojo this book will make your life a whole lot easier. One thing you should know before buying this book. It does not have in depth coverage of anything in the Dojox package, so you will not find anything in this book on the Data Grid! Take a few days and give it a read, then keep it on your desk for reference. You can't go wrong.

The First Book of Its Kind

I'm up against a deadline for a web application. The going is slow when you have to hand-carve the HTML, JavaScript, CSS and PHP. Dojo saves you at least two-thirds of the work, so I'm very grateful for it. But it takes some getting used to, and the on-line documentation is, well, succinct. Russell's book came along just in time. It's a lifesaver. The Introduction alone is worth the price. I found out about some invaluable Web development debugging tools that I'd never seen before. Russell provides a clear, concise explanation of some very important JavaScript notions: Closures, Context, and Anonymous Functions. And all of this before we even get to the toolkit! The book makes the Dojo easy to use and easy to understand. There's a wealth of coding examples, as well as complete lists of objects, methods, and so forth.