Manning - Laszlo in Action

about this book

Welcome to Laszlo in Action. This book presents a comprehensive overview of the fundamentals of the Laszlo LZX language. We’ve taken a slightly different organizational approach than is used by most books on programming languages, where the concepts are neatly laid out in a methodical order. But we believe this isn’t the way most people learn new languages; people need to be immersed in a language to gain fluency in it. So we organized our book to have an intensive set of introductory chapters, and then, at the earliest opportunity, we begin applying our rudimentary Laszlo LZX knowledge toward creating an initial prototype for a Rich Internet Application (RIA) called the Laszlo Market. Each chapter is designed both to cover the fundamentals of Laszlo LZX and to incrementally build our application.

This approach has the benefit of allowing us to first demonstrate concepts in a simple stand-alone manner, and then later apply these concepts within an application context. Because we are continually building and enhancing the work of previous chapters, this provides a scale that would not be achievable through other presentation methods. As a result, we strongly recommend that you read the chapters in consecutive order rather than skipping around.

An additional advantage of this approach is that we give you a full-featured initial working application that you can later tweak to create entirely new applications. This should save you lots of time and aggravation attempting to get many of these features working for the first time. The source code for the Laszlo Market application is available at www.manning.com/klein as well as at www.laszloinaction.com.