J. McGroarty said
This book covers most of the main dojo/dijit components - but is quite lacking with regards to the dojox area. As a "Definitive" guide - these topics should be covered in depth. One of the best Javascript books I've found was "Javascript - The Definitive Guide". A superb book with detailed reference material. In comparison, the Dojo version falls way short when used as a reference guide. Dojo has so many quirks and pitfalls that it is almost better to just delve into the the source code to find out exactly how something works - unless books are willing to go into extensive details. As such, this book does not, and is not up to par with what I had expected from a "definitive" guide.
Opinion said
This book doesn't do justice to an otherwise excellent series. The examples are error prone and just do not work. Usually a technical book provides the complete source code. You just need to unzip and then run it. But not so for this book. It's extremely frustrating when you're trying to learn something new. As well it depends on an external dojo src link which may/may not be available. I don't think the author even tested out the src code. If he had it would have been simple to just include it. It's unclear what version you should actually use too. This makes a huge difference for the examples. It also missed out a section on simple select buttons it talked about advanced select options and everything else. I'm going to return this one.
RRPeterson said
This book does a good job of being a helpful reference manual with just a little extra.
Anyone who has worked/struggled at all in depth with Dojo will tell you one of the most difficult things about it is the documentation. Often times in my projects I have found myself absolutely frustrated because the documentation is too sparse, or an example from 3-4 months ago will not work with the latest version I am using.
That being said the book overall functions better as a reference manual when you need a little more explanation behind specific parts of the framework than a "sit down and read cover to cover" manual. It has definitely come in handy more than a few times when the online documentation and archived community input did not include enough detail to accomplish what I needed.
GoJohnnyGoGoGoGo said
This book is more detailed and has more practical documentation and answers than "Mastering Dojo", which I found preachy and unnecessarily opinionated. Buy this book before that one. It helped me solve some tricky widget related problems.
On the other hand, this book does contain a lot of typos and even at least one instance of text which was repeated (copy paste paste).
John Wheeler said
This is the best book on DOJO out there. The dopes that gave it anything less than four stars are smoking crack. Why should it be the author's fault if you don't know what the hell you're doing? Don't let them dissuade you. This book rocks!
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