GWT in Action - Does it teach from the basics ?

[Rohan Dhruva]

Hi Robert and Adam,

The book's title - GWT in Action - implies that it is for people who already know GWT, and want to learn about actually using it .. As a person who knows a little bit of Java, will that book help me learn GWT ? Or is it for someone who already has lots of experience in Java ? Also, do I need to know about JavaScript and AJAX to follow the book, or learn GWT in general ?

Thanks

[Adam Tacy]

Hi Rohan,

Yes, it should absolutely help if you want to learn it (and we hope that is true for people from all levels - those brand new, those taking next steps and those looking for the extra steps, such as developing and using GWT Generators).

We tried to think of several types of people reading the book, including:

* New to GWT (to get an understanding of the tools, where and when to use them and identifying the common starting pitfalls).
* New to client side (understand widgets, panels and events - as well as how to create new ones if necessary - drawing on our code from the GWT Widget Library)
* New to (GWT) client-server side comms (covering amongst other things, Ajax and GWT's Remote Procedure Call (RPC) approach)
* More advance topics (Automatically generating code, managing properties (changing aspects of the program) etc)

Our intention was to try and have a book that built on itself, so if you are completely fresh to GWT then the first few chapters will give you a grounding, then next few some more understanding, then the more complicated client-server aspects, following up with the advanced topics.

Chapter 2 and 10 are available for free on the books home page (http://www.manning.com/hanson/) and they should give you a flavour of what we were trying to aim for.

Hope that helps!

//Adam

[Rohan Dhruva]

Thanks a lot Adam, for the detailed reply