Learning Knockout.js

Oracle JET leans on Knockout.js for data binding. It’s not an absolute requirement because JET is modular, but the JET sample apps and templates do come with Knockout baked in.

This is a decent intro to Knockout.js: Learning Knockout.js from Packt Publishing. In the video tutorials Robert Gaut reviews some design patterns and uses his foundation code to discuss bindings, context, and custom functions. They even gave me a fancy certificate!

The video doesn’t introduce AMD and RequireJS until the end and then only brushes on it in a quick lesson, so you’ll need to take that in consideration when looking at the Oracle JET sample code.

For that, you could take a look at Building Large, Maintainable, and Testable Knockout.js Applications by Jonathan Creamer. He starts his article with coverage of require.js and builds up an app from there. He also discusses “the this problem” to give some background on why you keep seeing var self = this in code samples.

Another couple articles (ht Jim Marion) are The Top 10 Mistakes That KnockoutJS Developers Make by Mike Mellenthin and 10 Things to Know About KnockoutJS on Day One. Sometimes reading what people much smarter than me and farther along in their adoption of tools or techniques helps me get a feel for what I need to learn.

Here’s a video straight from the horse’s mouth: Steve Sanderson himself discusses building a single page app with Knockout in Architecting large Single Page Applications with Knockout.js. Sanderson has a few other recorded videos out there, but I haven’t gotten to them all yet.

Also, there’s the Knockout.js website itself, with a series of tutorials that walk through the basics of data binding.