A few days after I posted my previous entry on the JavaScript books I was reading, I got an email from a book publishing company asking if I was interested in a free review copy of their latest JavaScript book. I was a little skeptical at first, however, after a brief chat, the only string attached was that I write blog entry on what I thought of the book. This seemed like a fair deal, so I decided to take them up on it.

Since I’m getting something for free, I figured the honest thing to do would be to open about it so people don’t think my opinions are biased, since I do tend to gush about stuff I like (YUI, Google Alerts, etc.). When I don’t like something, I usually just don’t write about it. However, if this book ends up sucking, I will be brutally honest about how much it sucks. Though based strictly on chapter 1, the book appears as if it will be a pretty decent read.

Anyway, the topic of the book is The Dojo Toolkit. Dojo is a free open source JavaScript library that provides a number of widgets and utilities, much like jQuery and YUI. Right now I’m unsure of how it compares to these other frameworks, but it looks very promising based on what I’ve seen so far from various Dojo websites. The charting package looked particularly interesting.

Hopefully I’ll learn a lot of cool stuff about Dojo. I wont pretend to be a JavaScript expert, so the review I’ll write will most likely be in the same style as my last review – though probably a bit more thorough. For those of you who are curious, the book is called “Learning Dojo” (that’s the book’s actual website, this is not a sponsored link and I don’t get anything if you buy the book – not that you shouldn’t buy it, I just want to be clear since that page is mostly about buying the book).

After I finish this new book I’m going to get back to my JavaScript Design Patterns book (which it’s really good so far – though I’d only recommend it to hardcore JavaScript developers). And after that I’m going to get back to writing stuff for this site. Hopefully all of this reading will pay off with some nicer apps, tutorials, and programming examples.