GWT in Practice

Gets right into coding reusable GWT applications. Recommend this book to get feet wet with learning GWT.

As others have stated, the use of patterns in this book is both sophisticated and clarifying. And I would second the recommendation made by another reviewer for Head First Design Patterns as a compatible and synergistic companion to this book. The original "classic" text on GWT was GWT in Action. When that book was published, GWT was new enough that the authors had to concentrate fairly heavily on introducing its unique features. This new book "gets over" that sense of newness and instead focuses on how general software design approaches (e.g., patterns) can be implemented using the tools made available by GWT. This subtle change of focus represents a maturation of GWT software development practice that parallels the growing maturation of the GWT community, and of the technology itself. A terrific "extra" that accompanies the printed book is the ability to download a searchable PDF of the entire book online using instructions provided in an insert. Once I had that, I hardly needed the printed book at all. One caveat: at least one example that I encountered (for the UserEdit class of chapter 4) had some typos (UserEdit made reference to a variable called address that was actually from a prior example, AddressEdit), and when I searched online for downloadable code, I found that this example had been significantly re-written (eliminating the problem in the process, amd also generally improving the example code's clarity). So, if you purchase this excellent book, be sure to download the sample code right away and then check it against the examples that are printed in the book as you go along. [...] It would have been nice if the authors had published errata on that same page, since apparently (from the downloadable examples) they encountered and corrected some problems, and in fact I have just noticed that there is an online forum for the book on the publisher's Web site [...] that mentions the problems with chapter 4 in multiple posts going back quite a long time, but I could not find any comprehensive listing of such errors by the authors themselves. Despite such annoyances, the book deserves five stars because of its otherwise exceptional insights and presentation.

GWT in practice covers the Google Web Toolkit at a level few books on this subject matter go into. The book is well written and also approachable for someone who is new to GWT. I particularly found useful the chapter on deployment which also covers deployment using Maven with the GWT-Maven plug-in, and the chapter on CI which covered Hudson. IMHO it is worth buying the book for these chapters alone as this information is hard to find anywhere else.

As a beginner to GWT, I was interested in a book that provided examples and also explained components. This books does exactly both. The examples vary from very simple to complex. They really made it easy for me to understand how to actually us this in practice, no pun intended. I definitely agree with other reviewers that a background in Java will definitely be necessary to easily follow. Overall, this is one of the better technology books I have read.

For starters: I am one of the pilot developers in my company (a large Fortune 100 Financial Institution) doing GWT development. We are about to release our first product to the business. So I've spent the last 18 months or so learning and beating my way through GWT. In the process, I've bought all the GWT books that are out there. Straight to the point: this is the best one out there. Period. Cooper & Collins have produced an excellent book on User Interface development for the next generation....and you get an outstanding understanding of basic and advanced principles in GWT. Plenty of good stuff for the beginner as well as someone who claims to be fairly advanced. GWT in Action by Rob Hanson used to be my favorite...it still has a soft spot for being the first real GWT book, and a great reference book. Collins & Cooper have managed have the same energy that David Geary has in GWT Solutions (which is lofty praise if you've ever seen David speak about GWT!). I really like Dewsbury's GWT Applications, but GWT in Practice is actually better. There are 3 other GWT books (can't remember their names because they're at home), the 2 black and yellow ones and the flower book...I really like GWT in Action better. I've used gwittir, which is a binding framework from Cooper & Collins, so when I saw that they had written a book, I was psyched. In this day and age when book sales gotta be tough because of all the info on the internet, I was glad to see a book that I didn't think was just a rehashing of what's out there online. Good stuff guys...crank out a new version when GWT 1.5 is fully baked and I'll buy it!