Dojo: The Definitive Guide

What's in This Book

Part I of this book is very much a standard library reference that exposes you to the various nooks and crannies of Base and Core, the parts of the toolkit that comprise a JavaScript standard library. Base comes across the wire^[5] at less than 30KB, and is feverishly optimized for speed, size, and utility. Packing rich functionality as diverse as AJAX calls, DOM querying based on CSS selector syntax, standardized event propagation, and functional programming utilities like map and filter, you'll quickly wonder how you ever got by without it. Core includes lots of additional features for operations like animations and drag-and-drop; while they are incredibly useful, they just aren't as common to all use cases as the machinery in Base.

Tip

One caveat about Part I of this book is that it defers a full-blown discussion of the parser until Chapter 11, when Dijit is introduced, because the most common use case of the parser is for parsing widgets. The parser is briefly mentioned in a Chapter 7 sidebar, though, because it is quite helpful for conveniently setting up drag-and-drop.

Part I includes the following chapters:

Chapter 1

Provides a quick introduction to the toolkit including topics such as Dojo's architecture, how to get and install Dojo, how to get Dojo into a web page, and some sections that provide some examples so that you can see Dojo in action.

Chapter 2

Provides an extensive overview of commonly used utility functions that are extremely common and useful for ...