Ext GWT 2.0: Beginner's Guide Review

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Ext GWT 2.0: Beginner's Guide ReviewBook Structure
It's a well-planned book, Chapter 1 tells the reader what you might call 'pre-basics', where GXT came from and why, what the alternatives are, and what factors might affect your choice of language.
Chapter 2 is where you get your hands dirty, starting with the sample/demo that is downloadable from the Sencha website (Sencha produce GXT). There's a brief overview of GXT's features. We then move on to creating a blank project and adding things to it.
Chapter 3 introduces forms and windows, Chapter 4 tells you about 'data- backed components' which allow you to connect sets of data with, say, a table and have GXT worry about paging and so on. Chapter 5 brings in more components and Chapter 6, templates.
Chapter 7 introduces the GXT MVC (Model-View-Controller) setup. The book has been referring to the component parts for some time now, but this is the first reference to MVC. You can use GXT without MVC (as the book has been doing up to now), but if you're going to use GXT to its full extent, a quick overview of MVC might have been useful earlier on. Maybe it was felt that this would be too much information for a newbie, but if you have come across MVC before then a quick skim of chapter 7 before you really get into the book might be useful.
Chapter 8 tells you about Portals and Drag-And-Drop (I can't see why some of these subjects are lumped together - probably the publishers have rules as to chapter length), Chapter 9 is about charts, and the last chapter is entitled 'Putting It All Together' but is really only about using Google AppEngine (GAE).
Target Audience
The book is aimed at programmers who know Java, so it's not for people coming from unrelated languages or people who have just been using HTML and a few simple lines of JavaScript. You could argue that the fledgling GXT programmer could get a book on Java as well, but there are problems with this: do you learn Java first? That's a pretty big ask, and GXT and GWT only use a subset of Java so there's no way to know what that is if you haven't read about GXT. If you start with GXT, you don't know the Java. If you try to do both at once, it will be quite hard work.
If you come to this book with no experience of GXT or GWT, but you do have experience of pretty much any 'curly-bracket' language and a reasonable level of intelligence ... of course you do :-) ... then you won't have any trouble - if you understand object-orientation, even vaguely, then Java is not a problem. The examples in the book are simple to follow.
If you are an experienced programmer, then you'll probably not read the book from cover to cover. If you do, then you'll skip the parts you think you know. You'll skip the 'What Just Happened?' paragraphs, and you'll skip the quizzes. Most probably, you'll dip into it, firstly to get set up and get a blank project, to get an overview of what is available, and then, when there's something you get stuck on, to find a quick example of how to do it.
As a beginner, the 'What Just Happened?' paragraphs are a useful check on your understanding, but I doubt that anyone much will actually do the quizzes whatever their level. 'What JavaScript library is GXT closely related to?' Who cares? It doesn't affect what we're doing any more than knowing how to drill an oil well helps you drive a car.
Summary
I can't tell you how complete a reference this is since this is my only experience of GXT, but it's a 'Beginner's Guide', it says so in the title. It seems to get you to a reasonable level by the end - you can produce an MVC application and create data-bound controls as well as charts and all the other useful buttons, bells and whistles, and you can deploy to GAE if you should so wish.
You'll be able to do a lot of useful work, and, having reached this level, you'll probably add to your knowledge by searching the Internet when there's something you'd like to do but don't know how, so it's probably the only GXT book you'll ever need.
It's a book for complete beginners with GXT, but not one for complete novice programmers, but as stated before, if you have curly-bracket- language experience (or a Java tutorial and a fair amount of patience and/or determination) then you'll not have a problem with the lack of explanation of Java. The examples are clearly explained, at least for someone with my experience, the Java is simple, and there are no obvious gaps - the book holds together as a whole.Ext GWT 2.0: Beginner's Guide Overview

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