Chapter 1, User Management Web App, provides a more in-depth look into why we chose DHTMLX over other libraries and explains exactly what we will be building.

Chapter 2, Download, Setup, and Test, covers how to get going with the DHTMLX library and where to put the downloaded files. It also touches on Chrome's developer tools.

Chapter 3, Data Structures, Storage, and Callbacks, jumps into the application code and creating our storage and callback methods. It also gives a crash course in HTML5 and local storage.

Chapter 4, The DHTMLX Layout, shows how to create a layout and its different initializations and then attach one to the application.

Chapter 5, The DHTMLX Toolbar, is all about the toolbar and how to create, disable, and listen to when they are clicked.

Chapter 6, The DHTMLX Grid, goes in-depth into the grid component and its methods and events, and then coding a grid to the application.

Chapter 7, The DHTMLX Window, goes in-depth into creating a pop-up window with the window component.

Chapter 8, The DHTMLX Form and Calendar, covers the form component and its different validation types and items, including a calendar or date picker.

Chapter 9, The DHTMLX Chart, covers the chart component showing different chart types, adding multiple data series, and manipulating the look and feel.

Chapter 10, The Finish Line, goes over the entire application, and discusses some common troubleshooting and how to enhance the application further on your own.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript knowledge is assumed, as this book will be using these three fields. The goal of this book is to show us how DHMTLX's components work. Therefore, we will not be focusing on structure of code or advanced JavaScript objects and in-depth explanations.

JSON and HTML5 will be used for data storage locally, as to not involve the server-side database. If you are not an expert on any of these, don't fret. Throughout the book, if you have any issues or don't understand something, go do a little studying and come back. This will not be hard; I promise.

A web server is needed. Unlike normal HTML files with inline JavaScript, DHTMLX should be run on a web server. There are many web server options out there for you to install. If using Mac, there is a built-in web server, or, if using Windows, you can use options such as WAMP. These are both extremely easy to set up. It is not in the scope of this book to go into installation of these.

A code editor and web browser with development tools is needed. You will need some type of code editor and a web browser with developer tools to debug our JavaScript. Since you may either be using a Mac or Windows, let's use Notepad++ as our editor and Google Chrome for our web browser and tools. This will make it easier to follow. But if you are set in your tools already and comfortable with them, please use those instead.

This book targets anyone looking to build good looking web apps quickly, easily, and cleanly, with minimal cross-browser compatibility maintenance. The code you will write will be simple and not too advanced. If you are an expert backend developer, you will find better and more efficient ways to implement the application. For those of you who are not advanced developers, the code is clean and efficient enough to run this application without any issues at all in a production environment.

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

Code words in text are shown as follows: "The getUser method retrieves the user object in a string from our localStorage and parses the JSON string back into an object."

A block of code is set as follows:

getUser: function(id){
  var user = localStorage.getItem(id));
  return (user)?JSON.parse(user):false;
},

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "After it closes, re-open with the toolbar's add button."

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