This book's dedication says it all - "This book is dedicated to every single web developer who has lost sleep because of the ridiculous browser idosyncrasies". Speaking as one of those web developers I say "bravo" to the author Matthew A. Russell, a tenacious technologist with entrepreneurial zeal who has completed nearly 50 publications on technology.

From the O'Reilly blurb comes this little gem "Of all the Ajax-specific frameworks that have popped up in recent years, one clearly stands out as the industrial strength solution. Dojo is not just another JavaScript toolkit -- it's the JavaScript toolkit -- and Dojo: The Definitive Guide demonstrates how to tame Dojo's extensive library of utilities so that you can build rich and responsive web applications like never before. Dojo founder Alex Russell gives a foreword that explains the "why" of Dojo and of this book."

So, we've established that Mr Russell has a sense of humour and O'Reilly a sense of irony but what is in store for us in this book? Weighing in at over 400 pages this is a book for programmers and more importantly Dojo enthusiasts. There are lots of JavaScript toolkits out there but Dojo seems to be a favourite amongst the old school open source DHTML lot. The whole concept is explained in this book and on the plus side it's easy to read as well. If you've been trying to get your head around Dojo Dijits and want more than just a big picture look under the bonnet then this book has a lot to offer:

• A concise introduction to Dojo for all 1.x versions
• Examples and tested code samples so you can see Dojo in action
• An exploration of Dojo's standard JavaScript library and utilities
• Details on drag-and-drop, back-button handling and animation
• How to create and use Dijits (Dojo widgets)
• A look at DojoX subprojects, build tools and Dojo's unit-testing framework.

Want to get started straight away with Dojo? This book has all the informatin you'll need to do that. A double thumbs up from me.