About this Book
The ArcGIS API for JavaScript is a library built to work hand in hand with ArcGIS Server technologies. It’s designed to provide a wide range of tools that allow a developer to build everything from the simplest web-mapping application to a heavily used and feature-rich tool. What you decide to build is up to you and the needs of your users, but it’s been my experience that the ArcGIS API for JavaScript can meet most expectations.
This book, ArcGIS Web Development, is an introduction to the ArcGIS API for JavaScript, with a little bit of extra information thrown in to get you up to speed with the Dojo Toolkit that the API is built on.
There are a variety of web-mapping libraries available, and the ArcGIS API for JavaScript is designed to take advantage of the technology provided by ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS Online, both of which will be discussed in this book.
ArcGIS Web Development is divided into two parts: “ArcGIS JavaScript Foundation” and “A Sample Use Case.” If you’re already familiar with GIS and just want to learn how to use the ArcGIS API for JavaScript, you may be tempted to skip Part 1 entirely. I strongly recommend, though, that you at least familiarize yourself with chapter 3, which covers the ArcGIS REST API.