Chapter 1, Getting Started, covers the basic concepts and patterns that help us understand how Knockout works. It explores the key features of Knockout, including declarative binding, automatic UI refresh, dependency tracking, and templating. The second half of the chapter takes you through building your first Knockout application—an address book.

Chapter 2, Creating a To-do List Application, takes you through building a to-do list application. The application's features include adding, viewing, deleting, sorting, and completing tasks. It also includes features to set the priority on tasks and view the number of total and completed tasks.

Chapter 3, Creating an Online Customer Registration Form, walks you through building a customer registration form. The information captured by the form includes personal information, contact details, residential and postal addresses, and credit card information. The application demonstrates Knockout's ability to create dynamic forms.

Chapter 4, Adding Validation to the Customer Registration Form, describes how to add validation to the form that we built in the previous chapter. It explores two ways of applying validation: using custom extenders and the Knockout validation plugin.

Chapter 5, Creating a Customer Banking Portal, is the first chapter in a series of three that walks you through building a customer banking portal for MyBank. It lets you set up the navigation for the application, display users' contact details, their accounts and associated transactions, and their personal information as well.

Chapter 6, Enhancing the Customer Banking Portal, adds new features to the customer banking portal that we built in the previous chapter. This chapter helps you add features to allow the users to update their personal information and transfer funds between their accounts using a wizard component.

Chapter 7, Securing the Customer Banking Portal, explores the common token-based authentication mechanisms used in modern web applications. It walks you through securing the customer banking portal using token-based authentication.

Chapter 8, Building an Editable Products Grid with CRUD Operations, walks you through building an editable products grid application. The application integrates with a server through RESTful web services. Its features include displaying, deleting, adding, and updating products.

Chapter 9, Using Google Maps APIs with Knockout, walks you through building a map application using the Google Maps APIs. The application gives the users the ability to enter address information with autocomplete predictions, based on partial address input, and displays detailed address information. It also renders a map, places markers based on the addresses selected, and displays the route between the two markers.

In order to start coding along the examples and running the sample applications that come with this book, you need a device with internet connectivity so that you can download the libraries used in the examples as well as the sample code. You can use your preferred editor or development environment to write the code and start developing web applications. You also require one of the major browsers to run the applications.

This book is intended for designers and developers who want to learn how to use the Knockout library to develop rich, interactive, and modular web applications. This book will help you master both the basic and the advanced features of Knockout. The book assumes no prior knowledge of the Knockout library, but basic familiarity with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript would be helpful. The book is targeted towards readers who are inspired by the idea of hands-on learning. The sample real-world applications in this book will take you on a journey of building applications that range from basic level all the way to advance.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The retrieveContact function, which is used to retrieve a contact from the server-side."

A block of code is set as follows:

var contact = {
    id: 1,
    name: 'John',
    phoneNumber: '00 11 000000'
};

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

/* the model */
var member = {
    accounts: ko.observableArray(),
    selectedAccount: ko.observable(),
    selectedAccountTransactions: ko.observableArray([])
};

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Open the application in the browser and try hitting Submit without entering any information in the form fields."

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

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All code examples, whether in the book or downloaded from your account at http://www.packtpub.com are released under the terms of MIT license as stated here:

Copyright (c) Adnan Jaswal, 2015

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.