I have been a great fan of the "in action" series by Manning. So I got this book without much research. It turned out to be a little bit of a disappointment.

I am now 200 pages through the book and I still don't have a grasp of the architectural concepts behind most of what is written (the core Java to JS compilation). For example the author begins to discuss custom widget development without explaining the core event and element model of GWT. This is just an isolated example - the book is very poorly organized because most of the examples are referring to chapters and excerpts later on in the book.

Also the crux of the framework, the bigger picture so to say is not introduced upfront, the book begins with an example and tries to pull disparate pieces of information together. It reads more like a blog post then an authoritative reference. I think the comparison between GWT and other frameworks is a little bit of a waste of time for experienced developers who want to know GWT inside out.

That being said there are plenty of code examples and snippets - every component/panel/widget is explained decently well (don't expect details). Every thing is in the context of a bigger project - which is not very well explained however.

It could just be my preference of writing style - but I will have to give this book a low score. If you are looking to understand the inner workings of GWT, this book is not for you. Its more a non-comprehensive syntax manual.

I was very impressed with the quality of the writing as well as the depth of coverage. The authors explain them well and it is easy to follow the examples. I especially liked the fact that authors present GWT code using design pattern, e.g. Facade - I was able to re-factor my own code.

Using this book, I was able to teach myself GWT and also successfully build a GWT based Ajax application at work.

I am starting with GWT with this book after using various internet tutorials. The book proved really helpful to get me started. As an added bonus, the authors really like to write and provide small yet inspiring examples which you can download and test yourself.

Some reviewer criticized the order of the chapters. I did not have any problems with that - there is a very useful short introduction in the beginning. I could jump ahead to interesting chapters like RPC without any problem.

I would recommend this book for web developers currently writing web applications in any language and who are looking to add Ajax to their application. Although Java back ends benefit the greatest from GWT with GWT-RPC, JSON, a lightweight data format, can be used and so ASP.NET, PHP, Perl CGI, etc. can be used. Also a great reference guide for those currently using GWT. Here is a more detailed review (and a shameless plug for my blog): http://www.jlhdevelopment.com/wordpress/?p=6

Also check out this title coming out soon: GWT in Practice

This is the 2nd book I bought to do GWT. "GWT in Action" is by far the best book to learn GWT (at least when I bought it in summer 2007). Since I had already been using GWT, I used this book to successfully resolve a number of issues I was having, especially with event handling.

An area that could use improvement in future editions is explaining how to integrate with existing javascript code libraries, something that really has to be assumed is a requirement with GWT. A good javascript reference, like O'Reilly's "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" should also be acquired.

I use Instantiations GWTDesigner Eclipse plugin to do my code work.

I liked this book. It walks you though the subject with enough detail to get you started. It will not give you a very deep insight into how GWT is implemented, but still leaves you with sufficient understanding and plenty of practical examples to borrow

GWT in Action is a good read, with the pace and depth of instruction just right, suggesting these guys enjoy writing. They like explaining stuff, and the book's editors would have been hard-pressed to eliminate a paragraph without losing an interesting and useful tip or aside. And these guys are GWT software library developers themselves (see the GWT Widget Library at SourceForge, by Mr Hanson). I was enthralled by the GWT presentations at the Google Developer Day 2007 in Sydney, and immediately bought Google Web Toolkit: GWT Java Ajax Programming by Prabhakar Chaganti. I liked it, but GWT in Action is significantly better, which I bought soon after. It's the best.

This book is very basic. I was exploring the GWT RPC functionality. I found RPC example hardly useful to do anything with it. If you are looking for a book to develop RPC applications, I do not recommend this book.

Get the Dashboard example source code first and try out before buying the book. I was not impressed with the Dashboard example. Book spends most of the time building the example application.

Usually, I really like the "in action" series, but "GWT in Action" disappointed me. The book focus on examples "in action" almost to the exclusion of having the reader understand the concepts. It wasn't until the end of the book that I really understood what was going on.

I did like the step by step instructions on how to get started. The examples were good if you needed to do what the example did. It was tough to extrapolate to other scenarios though. Some of the code examples were rather long and involved. The end of the book was also good. It went into detail on HTML form controls, JSON, testing, deployment and most importantly - how GWT works. These would have been nice earlier in the book. Especially the HTML form section. The majority of AJAX at this time is related to forms. Since the cover says "easy AJAX with GWT", I expected more on form based AJAX examples.

I felt that the book was trying to reach too broad an audience. For beginners without an understanding of JavaScript/HTML/DOM, I think it is overwhelming. The book provides "what's new in GWT 1..4", but the book is overkill for someone already using GWT. Most of the time the book treats what happens under the hood of GWT as magic and other times it becomes important. This switching of focus is a bit confusing.