Customer comments on this selection.
 bad book.
This book contains a lot of errors in the code. This influences me a lot.
But it's a book to take a look for beginner. don't spend time on that.
 Get to Know GWT Fast - You Need To!
Automagically convert Java to JavaScript.
Thus begins the seemingly curious proposition of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
Of course, it's about a lot more than that.
For one thing, GWT addresses a key gap in the rapid delivery of the Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) based applications that are driving eyeballs and mindshare to Google's Web site.
By the time you've read Prabhakar Chaganti's book on the GWT, you'll be significantly wiser on at least two fronts. You'll know that:
1) There's a broad-and-deep software engineering ecosystem around the GWT that is fueling progress and delivering highly significant results.
2) Chaganti is an excellent guide with the ability to negotiate this ecosystem and drive you towards tangible outcomes.
Even though the book I reviewed was a complimentary copy provided by the publisher, I would happily pay for my own copy, and heartily recommend this book to others having interests in the GWT.
By the way, Packt has an articulated scheme when it comes to Open Source projects:
"Packt Open Source Project Royalty Scheme
Packt believes in Open Source. When we sell a book written on an Open Source project, we pay a royalty directly to that project. As a result of purchasing one of our Open Source books, Packt will have given some of the money received to the Open Source project.
In the long term, we see ourselves and yourselves, as customers and readers of our books, as part of the Open Source ecosystem, providing sustainable revenue for the projects we publish on. Our aim at Packt is to establish publishing royalties as an essential part of the service and support business model that sustains Open Source."
I cannot suggest that Packt is unique in this approach. Regardless, their approach is certainly welcome.
For an extended review, please see http://ianlumb.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/book-review-google-web-toolkit/.
 Covers many sweet spots, despite some sloppiness
This book is appropriate for complete beginners to the Google Web Toolkit. It is quite light on theory, but very hands-on and oriented towards practical exercises. Once you have worked through this book, you will have a very good understanding of GWT, though you will need a separate book for a more theoretical approach.
The orientation towards practical exercises is very good, as are the supplemental explanations in the short "What Just Happened?" paragraphs. Sometimes the small errors dotted around the book are a hindrance. Nevertheless, I very highly recommend this book; it will definitely get you up and running from zero onwards.
Overview of chapters:
Chapter 1: Getting Started. Basic conceptual overview, pointers to how to get started via websites, brief explorations of some of the samples bundled with the GWT download. Pity that Eclipse receives full focus, without mentioning alternatives, such as at least a mention of IntelliJ and NetBeans IDE.
Chapter 2: Creating a New GWT Application. A good, is slightly chaotically described first application. Here the small errors are a serious hindrance, especially on page 27, where the missing dot before 'quoteLabel' in the CSS can be a big stumbling block to the newbie. A lot is covered in this chapter, maybe it could have been split across two chapters instead.
Chapter 3: Creating Services. This chapter covers a crucial topic for GWT and does so very well. Without this chapter, the next chapter doesn't make sense. The explanations interspersed throughout the chapter are very good.
Chapter 4: Interactive Forms. A series of samples, each showing off a cool AJAX feature in the context of GWT: live search, password strength checker, autofill forms, sortable tables, dynamic lists, and Flickr-style editable tables. By the end of this chapter (50 pages long!), if you take your time and read the code carefully as you use it, you'll already have got your money's worth from this book.
Chapter 5: Responsive Complex Interfaces. Here we go into more complex scenarios: pageable tables, editable tree nodes, log spy, sticky notes, and jigsaw puzzle.
Chapter 6: Browser Effects with JSNI and JavaScript Libraries. Our detailed tour of GWT-AJAX sweet spots continue, with Moo.FX, Rico rounded corners, color selector, and Script.aculo.us effects. The misalignment of code, as throughout this book, is clearly apparent on page 149, in this chapter for example, which makes the book seem a bit sloppy in places.,
Chapter 7: Custom Widgets. A calendar widget and a weather widget are tackled in this chapter. Again advanced scenarios, but well explained.
Chapter 8: Unit Test. Great to have this chapter, and the next, in this book. Because, at this point, one has covered so many scenarios that one begins wondering about testing and I8N.
Chapter 9: I8N and XML. It's not completely clear why the parsing of XML is found within the same chapter as internationalization. Nevertheless, especially the XML parsing is interesting and is something I want to explore further. The code is all there and practical as always.
Chapter 10: Deployment. Tomcat and Ant deployment are covered, though it would have been nice if some other servers had been mentioned too.
Appendix A: Running the Samples. The samples are not easy to work with, they're all interrelated, relying on a common set of files, and one needs to pull them apart to work with them. Despite that, these are a crucial support mechanism for the book and do the job well.
My first GWT book
This was my first GWT book. I liked the book and was dazzled by the shear brilliance of the team that conceived and wrote GWT. It's a good introduction to a fascinating and practical library for writing web applications. As a follow-up I read the longer and deeper GWT in Action: Easy Ajax with the Google Web Toolkit which I also recommend. You cannot have too many GWT books!
loaded with errors, not worth the money
I got this book because it was the only one I could find on the market at the time. It seemed to me that this book was rushed to market; a good portion of the code examples contained errors so it would not compile or did not produce the results that were expected.
The downloadable code contains working code but the publisher didn't bother to put the code into the correct directory structure; everything is in the base directory even though the files themselves are in packages.
This book is not substantive enough to justify a $40+ price tag especially since it's riddled with errors I would recommend one of the other books on GWT that are now on the market over this one, they are more sustantive, better put together, and more reasonably priced for what you get.
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