Beginning Google Web Toolkit: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in Web Development) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The book is well written but is now terribly out of date. The book was written for GWT version 1.5, but at the time of my purchase GWT 1.7 was the latest release. There were more differences than I expected. In just the first third of the book I found the following:
- applicationCreator.cmd is no longer a GWT command. It has been replaced by webAppCreator.cmd
- webAppCreator.cmd creates a different directory structure than the illustrated examples.
- The default application that GWT generates has changed.
- A new event model was introduced in GWT 1.6. Specifically, Listeners are replaced with Handlers. You will encounter this for the first time in chapter 3.
- While I was following the exercises using GWT 1.7, Google released GWT 2.0 which further obsoleted this edition. The 2.0 release introduced a declarative UI with UIBinder. Of course that won't be in this book. Also in 2.0 "Development Mode" replaced the "Hosted Mode" which is great but will confuse the novice using this book as guidance.
The only way this book would be helpful is if you download GWT 1.5 to follow along with the examples. I don't know many programmers, novice or otherwise, that would be content to learn a technology on an old release with deprecated methods and obsolete tooling.
I like the narratives of the book, I like the way it flows, and if the authors ever decide to publish a new edition with GWT 2.0 with the same style and accuracy it would probably earn five stars. Unfortunately the book is too many releases out of date (which is too bad considering it was just Copyrighted in 2008!)

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Beginning GWT by Bram Smeets introduces one of today's most popular open source lightweight Java-based Ajax Web Frameworks, the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) from the ground-up.Written by an industry expert who has delivered many Web applications for his clients and a Spring expert, Bram takes a no-nonsense, down to earth approach to GWT and guides the reader though the development of a Web application front end using GWT from the ground up.This will be one of the first tutorials on GWT.