Chapter 1. Knockout Essentials

Though it is expected that you have experience with both JavaScript and KnockoutJS, we will still be covering the basics to establish a common foundation. This book wouldn't be complete if we didn't cover at least the basics. After that, we will look at building a simple application to create and manage contact information. This application will be used throughout the book to explore new techniques in Knockout and see how they fit into the larger process of application development. In this chapter, you will learn how to:

• Define viewmodels
• Write standard bindings
• Use extenders
• Use templates
• Put all these pieces together into a functional application

This covers most of the standard functionalities in Knockout. In the next chapter, we will look at creating our own bindings to extend Knockout.

Even if you have used Knockout before and don't think you need a refresher, I encourage you to at least read the section that covers the Contacts List application example. It's something we will be using throughout the book as we explore more advanced concepts.

Before we get started, let's get our development environment set up.